The Bard Is Calling Me Out
What’s the point of all this anyway? I’m thinking a lot about that this morning, wondering what else there is to say about gratitude, without repeating stuff over and over and over again. Every day I get up and look around and press reset and dig a little deeper and think in a new way about what I’m grateful for. Two days a week I polish something up and send it out into the ether so other people can look over my shoulder. I don’t know what it all adds up to, honestly. I don’t know if I’ll ever read anything I’ve written in my journal again. So what if I miss one day, anyway? What difference will it really make?
Of making many books there is no end, Ecclesiastes 12:12 notes, and much study wearies the body.
I’m in a big rush to keep some of this world’s incoming flow of info and beauty, almost frantic at times, living the life of a scrivener. Is it like the accretion of coral? Or like the slow darkening of teeth with daily coffee or wine? The clawing away of the shore by the surf and the wash?
Or is it perhaps the process that actually matters? The wanting to? The dailiness, the quotidian?
What’s the long-term value of a gratitude practice. One percent? I thought even if it’s one percent better, that’s a lot over ten years or a lifetime or at least the better part of an adulthood. My brush with mortality in 2004 didn’t make me one hundred percent more grateful for life or make me braver all the time, able to make hard phone calls, for example, because I was so emboldened. Same with this journal, the point of this practice of focusing on what I have. It doesn’t always exist in the forefront, but even if it’s one percent that turns into a lot over time.
Then I remember the Bard’s call in Henry V of once more unto the breach, my friends, once more, or close the wall up with our English dead. How to put a price, a number on the value of hearing that in your head at the right moment?
It can be hard in this interim between the holidays and whenever it’s kind of permanently spring-ish. The nights are still long, though the light is returning slowly by degrees. It’s very grey, it’s very, what’s the word, the word for the color of those early daguerreotypes? I’ll just let it percolate. And anyway, it’s not the same as this outside today. I’m just trying to avoid saying drab and boring and speaking about the lack of color overall because it is what it is, right, and it’s winter in New England.
So it has something, it’s not just lacking. As Henry Beston wrote, winter is a season in its own right, not just a negation of summer. I was driven to re-read Berndt Heinrich’s Winter World for that reason, I think. To look deeper into the mysteries of the season, the magic almost, the wonder of how animals survive Anyway, there’s a lot of winter left, that’s the point, even though we’re moving through it.
But, Shakespeare is calling me out, calling for me to not get lazy with my eating, my working out, my vigilance, my spirit, my soul, my vigor and I’m grateful for that.
