Yes Is Worth It
Grateful for the prospect of a new day and the opening of baseball season.
It’s now lighter at the end of the day and darker to begin it but the dark edges are being ineluctably pushed back by unstoppable forces. There’s no pulling it back and the soul of the people stirs and the deep soul of the earth stirs and it’s like how that faint breath you’re not sure of seems to hint of a wood fire burning. It’s out there, its source unclear. It is still powerful to ponder the deep ways of the earth and the life thereon and the power and the abundance and the way it can feel like home and foreign country all at once. “Where are the words,” Peter Matthiessen asked in The Snow Leopard, “for such ringing splendor?”
I woke up knowing I had to recover from feeling badly that to my mind I didn’t pull off the piece for a monthly periodical in which I write a column. Great idea, not well-executed. Strong start, didn’t nail the landing, and I had chewed on it a lot, but it didn’t all work in print. It seemed incomplete and I felt dissatisfied, but I had to move to another place, maybe like a relief pitcher who coughs up a walk-off homer but must pitch next day. He can’t be thinking I’m the one who lost the game yesterday but rather I get to go again today. I’m in The Show, I belong here. I am the GratiDude and I intend to write something authentic and useful about my journey, no matter how badly I think the other article came out.
I was in love with my idea and it fell flat and I had already gotten an extension past the due date. I just didn’t have command of my pitches. Started off well, but lost it. What I didn’t have, in my opinion, was a good outing, a successful effort, which sounds like lack, something I didn’t have. This journal, this blog, is not about lack, but rather its opposite, abundance, and how reaching for it, even without finding it, can change your day, your hour, your life.
Asking “What’s great about this?” is like planting a seed, maybe without seeing any immediate results. The new day comes and the old, spent one drops behind the horizon and the last game is in the books, however well I pitched, and is irretrievable. All I have, all I ever have, is right now. Schopenhauer noted that we seldom think of what we have, but always of what we lack. I hope this journal is steering me in a different direction. I think it is.
James Baldwin wrote early in Giovanni’s Room “I found out that people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, any more than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say yes to life.”
Is a yeasayer the opposite of naysayer? I never hear that word. Joseph Campbell says say yes, Molly says it over and over in Ulysses, and Baldwin adds a little piece here about its difficulty, at least at times. Yes is worth it. Let’s be yeasayers, no matter how we feel.
