Thank You Is Enough
Probably nearly everyone in America, if not the world, has offered some version, in some language, of this statement: “This is a strange time, isn’t it?” We’ve spoken it, emailed it or texted it maybe with multiple exclamation points. It seems to imply that there’s a “normal” or antipodal state that is “not this.”
I normally would have been to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park by now, but there’s no baseball. I normally would have been running in a marathon in October, but it was postponed one year. My wife and I normally would have been on Cape Cod the first weekend in August volunteering at the Pan Mass Challenge, as we have been for twenty years, but it has been “reimagined.” Normally I would have just walked in the barber shop last week, without having to wait outside or make an appointment. Normally, I would be going to work without wearing a mask all day and fogging up my glasses. Normally, we would have been in Sweden in April, visiting family and meeting a new grandson, rather than still trying to get our money back because the flight was cancelled.
Yet, as she reminded me, it’s been said that “Every time I argue with reality, I lose.” There’s nothing more real than right now and right now is all we have, whatever we might think “normal” is. I have had sixty seven years of making up what that is, which, in the whole planetary scheme of things, isn’t a hell of a long time.
In the Old Testament, Job is asked by the Creator “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone — while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?” My own vision is certainly limited in the twenty first century.
One deep hope I have is that by working to see the gifts in everything (however “strange,” it may seem), to peer underneath, to suss them out, one is on a mastery path, as with a martial art, and it can help one’s life in a practical way. Being able to see what you couldn’t see before by virtue of looking and practicing every day.
Gifts are there, though many are hidden until you have eyes to see. Perhaps it’s like looking at one of those silhouettes that can be two different images depending on how you view it. Is it a white chalice or two people looking at each other? Depends on focus. I’m keen on the idea that a life of practicing gratitude reveals more and more of what we can’t see, the key to every door. Putting in hearing aids, as I do every day now, I hear sounds I had forgotten about.
Meister Eckhart, the German theologian in the 13th century, once said if the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is “Thank You,” it will be enough. Everything, really everything, can be an occasion for paying attention and saying thank you.
