Lessons in Gratitude Day 225

I am now in this moment enjoying a nice, long exhale. For the better part of the afternoon and evening I’ve been poring over records, statements, documents, and publications all in the pursuit of credits and deductions as I prepare my 2011 income tax returns. I worked on them a little during the morning, but most of my activity has been between about 4 and 10 p.m. Somewhere along the way I decided to start doing them myself–not sure what exactly got into me–and have been doing them for the past six years. One piece of gratitude here: I am grateful that I only have to endure this once per year. And to my credit I must say that each year I get slightly more organized and do a better job over the course of the year of saving, filing, recording, and documenting all manner of minutia in preparation for this annual event.

All of this mind-altering financial activity has worn my brain down to a frazzle. I will, however endeavor to pull myself together long enough to express some simple gratitude for things that I appreciate and am grateful for in my life today. First of all, I am grateful for the dogged determination that I possess that causes me to get after something that needs to get done. There comes a point in many projects where you simply have to bear down and push through until it’s finished. Somewhere in my childhood or youth I was told this poem which, much to my chagrin, I likewise imposed upon my children. It goes like this:

When I taught this to my children, I hastened to add that doing it “not at all” wasn’t an option. They were to put their best effort into the task at hand, whatever the task happened to be. The “do it well” piece has been somewhat a bane in my life in that it caused the demon of perfectionism to rear its head in my life and in that of my siblings and others around me. It wasn’t enough to do something, you had to do it well. You had to be excellent. I have learned over time, sometimes the hard way, that good enough is alright sometimes. Everything doesn’t have to be excellent or the best or perfect. I am grateful to have mostly learned that lesson, though the pressure to be better than people’s expectations of me continues to pop up from time to time. In any event, I am grateful for the stick-to-it-ive-ness that allows me to plow through the madness of tax preparation time and emerge on the other side with my mental faculties relatively intact. May it be so this year as well.

I am also grateful for the opportunity that’s coming my way to share a piece of writing with a publisher. I won’t go into detail yet because it is very early in the process. For now let it suffice to say that I had let this particular work languish a bit in the midst of all the other stuff I’ve been working on over the past several months. A year or so ago I sent a draft of a portion of the manuscript to a close friend who works in book marketing at a fairly large, well-known company. For years I had nagged her to help me find an agent or get some advice from the publishing contacts she had. And for years, she never quite got around to it–life (kids, career, spouse, etc.) had an irritating habit of getting in the way. Suddenly, in the past week she up and asked a friend of hers in the book publishing world if he had suggestions or contacts to help my book get looked at. He turned around and gave her the name of a executive at a literary agency and offered to make contact with him on my behalf. All I would need to do is e-mail the exec with a copy of my manuscript and he would give it a read. EEK! So, in short order (as in this weekend), I need to dust off my manuscript–literally and figuratively–and see if it’s in any shape to send to this man sometime early next week. My characters are laughing at me. I had been neglecting them and now they would be back front and center commanding the attention they so richly deserve.

Irrespective of what happens with this particular person on this particular occasion, I will have broken the ice and done something I’ve thought about doing for a long time. Of course I’m quaking in my boots. What if he hates it? How will I respond to rejection? How would I respond to success? All kinds of interesting questions arise for me, and that’s a good thing. I am excited and terrified, but I will “do it well or not at all!” I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from the process.

It has been a long taxing (okay I probably should have resisted the pun) day. I am grateful for feeling productive though I still have much work to do before the taxes are done and the manuscript is ready and all the other things I have in the hopper are moving along toward completion. And I am simply grateful to be alive. Though I was mostly inside at my computer working on my taxes, it was a gorgeous, springlike Bay area day. The past few nights the near full (waning) moon has shone bright and beautiful through my window. Cats fighting and turkeys gobbling and all manner of birds singing have sounded outside my window as the day and night progressed. All is well. May I continue to experience happiness and the source of happiness. So may we all. So be it!