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Category: gratitude

In with the New

In with the New

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The first day of a new year, this one with 366 days. A bonus day for a bonus year. The bonus day is because we have a Leap Year, but the bonus year? 

The idea is this: If I think of it as a bonus, I’ll appreciate it more. I’m not ancient, but I’m old enough that this idea resonates. Even if I wasn’t, the bonus concept makes sense. 

I’m just finishing The Book of Joy, a compilation of interviews between the Dalai Lama and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu. One of the recommended “joy practices” is to make time each morning to set an intention for the day. 

Today’s intention is to appreciate this new year as it’s dawning, and to live this new year as if it is a gift. Because it is.  

Christmas Greetings

Christmas Greetings

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Once again the days have passed, the splendid ones and the trying ones. Once again we’ve come back to this point, which is for me, and for many, the great pause. Christmas Eve. Christmas Day. Soon to be followed by New Year’s Day and the delicious week in between. Once again I’ll re-run this blog post, one I wrote in 2011. Merry Christmas!

12/24/11

Our old house has seen better days. The siding is dented, the walkway is cracked, the yard is muddy and tracked with Copper’s paw prints. Inside is one of the fullest and most aromatic trees we’ve ever chopped down. Cards line the mantel, the fridge is so full it takes ten minutes to find the cream cheese. Which is to say we are as ready as we will ever be. The family is gathering. I need to make one more trip to the grocery store.

This morning I thought about a scene from one of my favorite Christmas movies, one I hope we’ll have time to watch in the next few days. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Jimmy Stewart has just learned he faces bank fraud and prison, and as he comes home beside himself with worry, he grabs the knob of the banister in his old house — and it comes off in his hand. He is exasperated at this; it seems to represent his failures and shortcomings.

By the end of the movie, after he’s been visited by an angel, after his family and friends have rallied around him in an unprecedented way, after he’s had a chance to see what the world would have been like without him — he grabs the banister knob again. And once again, it comes off in his hand. But this time, he kisses it. The house is still cold and drafty and in need of repair. But it has been sanctified by friendship and love and solidarity.

Christmas doesn’t take away our problems. But it counters them with joy. It reminds us to appreciate the humble, familiar things that surround us every day, and to draw strength from the people we love. And surely there is a bit of the miraculous in that.

Photo: Flow TV

Anticipation

Anticipation

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The presents are wrapped and tucked under the tree. The refrigerator is stocked, and the mantel is filling with cards. The Seattle branch of the family arrives today, and the Kentucky branch tomorrow. If I could ask for anything right now it would be for a super-duper slow-down-time machine — because I know the next few days will vanish in a blur.

Since I’m pretty sure such a device will not magically materialize, I’m doing the next best thing: savoring the moments, anticipating what’s to come.  

I’m contemplating the tree, not the biggest we’ve ever had but not the smallest, either. And the gifts themselves, small tokens of the great love I feel for the people receiving them. How good we have a season devoted to giving. For me it underlines this basic fact: that joy is not ours to hold — but to spread around and give away. 

Extending Thanksgiving

Extending Thanksgiving

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If Thanksgiving lasted a week instead of 24 hours, this would be its final and most celebratory day — the last verse of the hymn, when voices sing louder and the organist pulls out all the stops. It would be the  gratitude you feel after sickness, relief tinged with wonder that the body can be again as it once was. 

The last day of a week of gratitude would be a crescendo of thanks, cymbals crashing, timpani rolling, a fanfare of trumpets. 

And because this week of thanksgiving would be ending on the birthdays of two people dear to me — a daughter and a brother — there would be a special surge of gratitude for the presence of these two people in my life.

Come to think of it, a week of thankfulness might prove so invigorating that next I’d need a month of it. 

 

Ripeness

Ripeness

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Before the flurry of preparation begins, I search for a poem to serve as grace before the meal. Or if not, to sum up gratitude for my eyes only. This one does: 

Ripeness

Jane Hirshfield

Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.

Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.

To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.

And however sharply
you are tested —
this sorrow, that great love —
it too will leave on that clean knife.

Stealth Gratitude

Stealth Gratitude

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I’ve known people who keep a gratitude journal, and I admire them for it. Appreciating what we have is an art improved by practice, and noting the specifics for which we feel thankful — not the generalities but each particular stroke of good fortune — is one way to do it.

But I enjoy being ambushed by gratitude: opening the shutters on a cold spring morning and being shocked by the light that pours inside. Running an errand and being enraptured by a sunset that sets the sky on fire. Eating warmed-up baked ziti and marveling at how good it still tastes.

Gratitude can be coaxed and analyzed and marshaled like a foot soldier. But I prefer the stealth variety, the kind that surprises me with joy. 

Flash Gratitude

Flash Gratitude

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I have in my temporary possession a book called The Best of Brevity. It’s a compilation of short essays from the journal Brevity, which features flash nonfiction. 

The genre of flash nonfiction is relatively new to me, although I write it everyday. It is the true-to-life equivalent of flash fiction. part of a trend — probably long since peaked if I’m catching onto it — toward the brief, the ephemeral, the transitory. 

Let me add to this canon with what I’ve come to think of as flash gratitude. 

Flash gratitude is the sudden, piercing awareness of life’s blessings. Stubbing one’s toe and thinking … at least I have a toe to stub. Or hearing the gentle purr of forced-air heat and giving thanks for the warm home I sit in as a result. 

I had a moment of flash gratitude yesterday when I heard about fellow Virginians trapped for 18 to 20 hours on an impassable I-95. They were cold, hungry, frightened and, most likely, angry. They were bearing the brunt of the snow storm in a real and all-too-personal way. 

Let this be a gratitude trigger, I told myself. Whenever life looks bleak and purposeless, I will conjure up those poor souls trapped in their Kias or Toyotas or Hondas or Fords, those poor shivering drivers and passengers, and my heart will nearly burst with joy that I am anywhere else but on a snow-packed, jack-knifed-tractor-filled I-95. 

(This snow has its beauteous moments, too.)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

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Once again I’ll re-run this blog post, which I wrote ten years ago. Merry Christmas!

12/24/11

Our old house has seen better days. The siding is dented, the walkway is cracked, the yard is muddy and tracked with Copper’s paw prints. Inside is one of the fullest and most aromatic trees we’ve ever chopped down. Cards line the mantel, the fridge is so full it takes ten minutes to find the cream cheese. Which is to say we are as ready as we will ever be. The family is gathering. I need to make one more trip to the grocery store.

This morning I thought about a scene from one of my favorite Christmas movies, one I hope we’ll have time to watch in the next few days. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Jimmy Stewart has just learned he faces bank fraud and prison, and as he comes home beside himself with worry, he grabs the knob of the banister in his old house — and it comes off in his hand. He is exasperated at this; it seems to represent his failures and shortcomings.

By the end of the movie, after he’s been visited by an angel, after his family and friends have rallied around him in an unprecedented way, after he’s had a chance to see what the world would have been like without him — he grabs the banister knob again. And once again, it comes off in his hand. But this time, he kisses it. The house is still cold and drafty and in need of repair. But it has been sanctified by friendship and love and solidarity.

Christmas doesn’t take away our problems. But it counters them with joy. It reminds us to appreciate the humble, familiar things that surround us every day, and to draw strength from the people we love. And surely there is a bit of the miraculous in that. 

Together

Together

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It’s 9 on a Thanksgiving morning and for once I remembered to turn on the TV in time to catch the parade from the beginning. It will be on in the background as the dust flies, the turkey roasts and the potatoes boil.

But the big story for most of us this year will not be on a screen. It will be in living rooms and family rooms and kitchens across the nation.

It will be when we rub shoulders, click glasses and — dare I say it? — hug each person who enters our home. For the big story this Thanksgiving is that we’re celebrating it together.

Morning Thought

Morning Thought

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For someone who doesn’t always sleep through the night, I’m always grateful to wake up, glance at the clock and see that it’s truly morning, not some middle-of-the-night hour. (Glancing at the clock is necessary now as the light dwindles. I did it this today since it was still dim at 6:30.)

It strikes me often, though, that the gratitude I feel upon finishing a seven- or eight-hour snooze ought to carry over to the four- or five-hour  variety, as  well. After all, I usually drift back, and when I don’t, there is always something relaxing I can do: read or write or pick up a dream thread and follow it back to its source. 

William Arthur Dunkerley said it best: “Thank God for sleep! And when you cannot sleep, still thank him that you live to lie awake!”