Nothing Deathless Here

Craig "The GratiDude" Jones
Notes From The GratiDude
3 min readSep 5, 2019
Photo Credit: Harshal S. Hirve

There’s not usually much alignment or coherence between what I write in my daily journal and these bi-weekly blog posts. The latter I polish up, making sure they’re sanded and the corners are all level. I’m getting used to just pressing send twice a week whether it’s “perfect” or not. It’s a good thing to be aware of what you’re sending out into the ether, for sure. I think that’s important and to think you’re not wasting people’s time with just schlock junk.

However, I’m less interested in this as performance than as catalyst for someone else’s own gratitude work. It’s easy to get so consumed with whether I’m writing well and how I’ll look that I can forget why I’m actually doing this. The journal I write in from which this whole blog series was born has none of that concern. I just write about whatever’s on my mind, without concern for punctuation or run on sentences or crossing t and dotting i. There’s a heartbeat, real life, right now immediacy, most of which probably wouldn’t interest any one else.

Thing is, that’s everyone’s life. What do you see? What are you grateful for? What obstacles are in the way of being grateful? It’s not about what I’m grateful for or my struggles to feel any gratitude on a given day. Hopefully, whatever I happen to write could be suggestive or resonant for you and your own life, your own Inquiry Into A Gratitude Inspired Life.

Most of my words are compostable, nothing deathless here. Any writer needs to accept that. John MacDonald (he wrote, for example, all the Travis McGee books) said he thought one needed to be prepared to write at least a million non saleable words. What I care about is how many times someone took the time to read one of these and went off on their own riff, about their own life, wondering how to be grateful on this given day.

Usually I don’t write about anything special in my journal. Like today’s for example.

“Just now I was thinking about how vegan or plant-based diets can still be wanting, can in fact suck, and the rap against them can be sometimes justified. The harder part, or at least the more neglected one, is eating whole foods. It’s plant-based whole food with every bite as close to unprocessed as possible. I could do better with that myself, though we do fairly well as a household. A salmon steak can be closer to whole food, plant-based or not, than some vegan food. I’m grateful for that reminder, from wherever it came just now. The carrots I have in my apron at work are close to whole, the peanut butter pretzels are not. The article Seth emailed us from a newsletter with a rant about how plant-based is a scam and not healthy (by a paleo guy, turns out) may have been part of this. I agree with some of his screed, that’s the thing, but I already did anyway. Plant-based is a bandwagon in the food industry. Slap the words on a product and it’ll get more noticed now. I really appreciate that. I get lazy at times about the whole food part.

Grateful also that Streak (my high-miler, 2005 Honda Civic) passed yet another inspection, for a final chance this season to go to Fenway tonight, for the morning’s cool air, for the opportunity to do yet another blog post due to the merciless tick tock with which there is no arguing and against which no resisting, for author Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life which I just got from the library in which he credits his mom with his love of literature. He trembles with gratitude, he wrote, remembering her. That spoke to me with respect to my own mother and the gifts she gave me of books and reading and literature and music.”

What about you? What stirs your soul and what interests you today?

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