The Tooth Of The Matter
A young man with whom I work was leaving the store yesterday and heading for a dentist appointment. I asked him so is this just for a cleaning or are you having some work done or what?
No it’s just a cleaning, a regular checkup I had to postpone the other week when I was sick. I never have any work done because I’ve never had any cavities. Really, I said, that’s awesome. I don’t meet many people who can say that. I never had any myself until I was 28.
And he came back towards me for a moment and pumped his fist (the way men love to do) and said I win. I’m 31. It was a great moment actually and I said to him you’ve saved yourself a lot of money and pain having great teeth like that.
I remember my first little cavity was fairly traumatic for me like a dam had been breached or a protective wall. I have had a handful of cavities over the years and I’ve had some wisdom teeth taken out and some other work, but for the most part I’ve had terrific teeth probably by dint of genetics. I’ve been a faithful toothbrusher, but I haven’t been a fanatic either, so some of it has to be DNA, I assume. Anyway, the point is the conversation helped me remember my history of cavity-free years and having no fear of going to the dentist. I had forgotten, for years, even though I look at my teeth every day in the mirror. I felt grateful for my good teeth and for that moment in time to remember.
It’s the forgetting isn’t it? We all have moments of gratitude in our lives. it’s hard to be a sentient being and not have some. But we do forget about the good things in our life both in the present and in the past. Hell, that’s why we have lost and found departments. I lost something at the Y (I’ve lost a couple of somethings actually, over the months) and it wasn’t at the little basket right at the front desk so she took me downstairs to the large room with multiple bins of clothing, goggles, water bottles, jewelry, shoes, you name it, and it wasn’t there either. I just forgot.
I also forgot to remember how grateful I was for food yesterday. I didn’t feel grateful, in the moment, for one bite. I didn’t judge myself about it, but I did notice it. Now I realize some of this is designed by evolution to help us live our lives not having to think about certain matters and be able take them for granted. Like food security, if we have it. We can trust that our cars are going to start and that we’re going to come home to a warm house on these dark nights around the solstice. I get all that and yet it’s does somehow mitigate against feeling gratitude at points. Because we forget.
There’s some reason it’s good for us to feel gratitude as often as possible. That’s probably a subtext or a subtitle for this whole Inquiry into a Gratitude-Inspired Life. I take that as an article of faith. So I get up and I keep at the doing of this work. For some reason it’s important to note gratefulness, maybe even feel it, and then express it. I don’t know if it just puts you in the right place in the nature of things, I don’t know if it’s like yeast or champagne bubbles, or Mary Poppins’ spoonful of sugar.
Someone said that gratitude is the heart’s memory. That may be true but we probably also all need each other to remind us of the good things in our lives, like my young co-worker did yesterday just as a byproduct of going to the dentist.
