Pronoids of the World, Unite!
I got out my Pablo Neruda collection and just opened it, not sure what I was looking for, the way people do. Count me among the Chilean poet’s worldwide fans, but there are still many more poems which I have not yet seen than those I have. I tripped over these heretofore unmet lines–
“I am grateful, violins, for this day of four chords. Pure is the sound of the sky, the blue voice of air.”
I could have just closed the book right there and whispered “Thank you, Pablo” and “Thanks be for Pablo” and it could have been my gratitude exercise for the day. I pondered briefly what he meant with the reference to violins, but realized it doesn’t really matter, like with a lot of poetry. He gave me words for what I felt.
Mary Oliver said in The Summer Day that she didn’t know exactly what a prayer was, but she did know how to pay attention. Well, I’m no clearer than she is about what constitutes prayer, but those lines from Pablo Neruda are as close to it as anything I could have read or spoken today. I just opened a book at random. Maybe that’s part of “creating the conditions,” as I have written about before. I have the habit, I have the Neruda volume, I have the intention, I have opened up space for gratitude.
Intention is so critical. You need to intend to see it before anything else can happen. You may not get there today, but looking is everything. It’s the discipline of turning yourself into a pronoid.
What? Right, look it up. One definition of pronoia is the belief (Urban Dictionary adds “delusional”) that others are out to help you. None other than John Perry Barlow called it the suspicion the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf.
As Dr. Robert Emmons says “We’ve all heard of paranoia, but what about pronoia? This is the belief that others are conspiring to help us. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy, as JD Salinger put it in his novella Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. Grateful people are pronoids, expecting and seeing benevolence in the world, always aware of and easily sharing their gratitude, amplifying the good in themselves and in others.”
And, delusional it may in fact be. Who really knows? What I do believe is that we are all writing our own stories, anyway, and tend to be way more into paranoia most of the time, probably for good evolutionary reasons. It reminds me of orienteering with map and compass and how if you’re right-handed you should hold the compass in your left because you will unconsciously drift to the right of trees and boulders and ever so slowly drift off course. It’s a corrective to help you compensate for a natural tendency.
That’s what the Inquiry Into A Gratitude-inspired Life can be. A corrective, a few lines of poetry, a prayer, a whisper on this” day of four chords.”
