The Spirit I Seek
I was noticing how I increasingly don’t want to be inconvenienced or uncomfortable, as I get older, by any hassles, like weather and figuring stuff out logistically and being on phone calls late at night and having to make a writing deadline and driving two and a half hours north tonight after work to be with family.
Same with this Inquiry Into A Gratitude-Inspired life. It’s inconvenient, even difficult, for us to keep at it. You have to make time and you also have to dig deep sometimes. Working on being thankful when everything isn’t fun and fine and convenient and feeling good can be flat out hard work. One needs faith that for the time spent there really is a return on investment, that a gratitude practice is worth it, however clunkily, or clumsily we manage it.
As I think about how to avoid inconvenience, along comes Steinbeck’s great section in Travels with Charley about his prep for leaving with his poodle and his truck named Rocinante. After a lecture from his doctor saying “Slow down. You’re not as young as you once were” he wrote–
“And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it’s such a sweet trap. Who doesn’t like to be a center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.”
I don’t know how that lands for you, but it kicks my ass beautifully, every time it scrolls across my mind. It’s like one of those images you see when you close your eyes. My sister-in-law, the eye doctor, calls them floaters. I have one that looks like a seahorse who is actually kind of jolly and friendly and swims from left to right, bobbing up and down. This condition is called a posterior vitreous detachment (PVD) and I understand that they are usually benign and occur as the result of separation of the vitreous gel from the retina. They are also a great example of how reminders work.
Mine is a seahorse and yours could be anything. It’s personal, just like the Steinbeck quote, which shows up from time to time when I need it. I have a lot of those in my life as well as a lot of people, reminder people. They encourage me to keep at this and not quit and not give in to the inconvenience. If you have your eye on it, if you intend to live a gratitude-inspired life, those reminders will start to accrete in your life and be there like floaters.
They show up when you need them and you don’t need to make notes to yourself to make it happen. Annie Dillard says it like this–“The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here… which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.”
