Twice-Blessed Today
Stephen King wrote a classic sentence regarding a friend, still upset one year later about the previous baseball season (2003), which ended with an eleventh inning Red Sox loss to the Yankees and kept them out of the World Series yet again. He said “He’s not the only effen sailor on the Pequod.” I can’t use the same colorful colloquial expletive King used because some subscribers’ filters would detect it and reject the email. It’s a brilliant allusion to Moby Dick, of course, but also has been a game changer for me a good many times when I felt like whining and pissing and moaning about some circumstance in my life.
It has showed up, for example, when I’m stuck in a long line of traffic and I start to hear this still small voice saying you’re not the only effen sailor on the Pequod or gee, how many other people are happy to be out here?
The quote came in handy during our eighteen hour return trip from Stockholm, which included some unplanned running from the terminal where we had thought our flight originated over to the correct one. We also had a long wait at US Customs in Newark. We were on our feet for a long time and got a little cranky about it, but remembered the Pequod, and how nobody else wanted to be there either.
Then, also unbidden, came the thought that there are many in wheelchairs who would give everything they own for the chance to be upright and bipedal and would relish the opportunity to run a long way in an airport and wait in line with three hundred other slow moving people. The best part was that it didn’t occur like a rebuke from some inner critic yelling at me “You should be grateful for your legs, stop complaining.” It was a gentle reminder, like a warm May breeze, that didn’t discount the real fact that we were very tired.
Both trains were reality–Tired, yes, and grateful for our mobility, yes. Yes to all of it, Joseph Campbell said. Such simple yet profound pleasures right at our feet, if we are mindful enough to see them. I give thanks today for walking, one of my birthrights.
Thoreau wrote about this very subject in his essay Walking. “He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.”
He also said somewhere that firewood warms one twice. Once in the splitting and once in the burning. Maybe that’s true with walking however tired you may be. You can be blessed with the actual physical movement, and if the internal conditions are created, be twice-blessed because you experience gratitude in that moment, for that moment, right now.
Now is all we ever have. “May you embrace this day,” singer Carrie Newcomer said, “not just as any old day, but as this day. Your day. Held in trust by you, in a singular place, called now.”
