What Still Pulls On Your Soul?
My Capricorn wife turns sixty five today, and is thus joining me in being Medicare-eligible. New possibilities arise, when that happens. Her birthday always follows closely on the heels of the New Year and is a good time to recon, take a breath, pause, plan and look back. We did a little of that yesterday. What does she see for herself, ditto for me, and what do we see together.
What I saw was that on January 7 (this Thursday), I will have posted my 250th piece on Medium. One week later, January 14th, I will have written my 500th blog post overall as The GratiDude. I felt deep gratitude for those who have been reading these all along, encouraging me, offering advice, believing in me more than I have often believed in myself, and telling me that what I write often makes a difference for them.
I actually got teary thinking about what a gift you faithful readers have been. It is a powerful counterweight against the inner critic who says “Who the fuck do you think you are? There are some serious published writers out there on Medium, like Susan Orlean. Some have thousands of followers and claps and comments.”
This “brooding critic in the corner,” as Admiral Byrd referred to him, is another name for our prefrontal cortex (PFC). It’s like we Homo Sapiens all made an unwitting Faustian bargain. You get to have a brain that will enable you to take over the planet (for good or ill), but you also get this inner critic.
When I was sitting there, in that grateful space, thinking of people reading my musings, I just couldn’t have cared less what the critic had to say. I felt very rich, like I had just won the American Book Award.
My thought was that I could take some time, over the next few posts, and see what has happened over all these months and years. Where have we been? What have we learned? Where are we going?
I know there’s a freedom in giving myself permission to not have to write about everything in the whole world and even about all the things I find interesting. The heart of this gratitude practice, it seems to me, is to see what’s here in the moment and to let it speak and allow myself to follow. It feels closer to the pulse or the bone, maybe Thoreau’s idea of gnawing one’s own bone.
I’m often suddenly surrounded by quotes from great minds, almost too fast and too many, like sparks from an outdoor wood fire blown in my face that I’m ducking from and batting away. The world is so full of a number of things, says Stevenson, see the world in a grain of sand, says Blake, make one little room an everywhere, says Donne. Little portals can lead to the whole world, wardrobe doors can lead to Narnia.
So, I’ll be taking a look back, starting Thursday, at this journey. I don’t know how that looks, but it seems like the right time. It’s a good time to answer Rumi’s question.
“What in your life is calling you, when all the noise is silenced, the meetings adjourned… the lists laid aside, and the wild iris blooms by itself in the dark forest… what still pulls on your soul?”
