Lessons in Gratitude

Some days you get the bear, some days the bear gets you. Or something like that. This morning I started out gang busters, writing in my journal, getting a bunch of house type work done, cooking and eating a nice breakfast, cleaning up the kitchen afterward. Then suddenly the wind sort of went out of my sails. I got tired and a headache came on from out of nowhere and has pretty much lasted all day. In a short while I will get my jammies on and go to bed. Nevertheless I am grateful to have enjoyed that burst of energy this morning.

I am amazed at the human body and the things it is capable of. The fact of our living, breathing, moving, thinking, and all the millions of functions that we engage in over the course of a single day is nothing short of a miraculous. The complex interactions and delicate dance involved in even the tiniest action (blinking, swallowing, etc.) are wondrous. Then there are the moments like today for me when something isn’t quite clicking properly and suddenly my head hurts and I have to take a pain reliever and lie down. Even pain comes about as a series of intricate interconnections among various cells and organs and body systems. We are truly remarkable organisms and as the psalmist wrote, “wonderfully and fearfully made.”

In spite of my body’s minor rebellion against me, I still managed to get out for a bit to my younger sister’s house for dinner. As I wrote yesterday, one of the great blessings of my current life is my proximity to my three sisters. It continues to be high on my gratitude list each day. Although tonight is not one of my profound writing days, I am nonetheless grateful for the many good things that surround me on a daily basis. My full expectation is that after a good night’s rest I’ll be back in the swing of things and ready to make it a good day and a great week. May it be so!

This evening I called a friend with whom I hadn’t spoken to in well over a year. It was a good thing to do. I have known her since I was 14–our families were friends–and though I haven’t spent much time with her over the years, particularly as we’ve gotten older, I think about her from time to time. I think this is probably only the second or third phone conversation we’ve ever had. I realized as we chatted that she probably doesn’t get phone calls very often and so the first hour of the conversation passed quickly with us catching up on various things. The second hour did also. It wasn’t until I looked at the phone and realized we were headed toward three hours. The conversation ranged widely (mostly she talked and I listened) from family stuff, to books she’d read recently, and a variety of other subjects. I lost the advantage of time I’d gained from driving home in an unusually light commute, but I’m glad I called and checked in on her. It was an okay way to spend my Friday evening.

This has been a long week–even though it had the same number of hours and days in it as last week did, somehow this week has felt like it had twice the number of days of the normal week. I think I’ve taken a few mechanical bull rides, but mostly it’s been a predictably tiring, draining week. Still, I am grateful for so many things this week–I’ve written about most of them, and much of my gratitude has focused on simple things: the “basics” like food, shelter, and warm clothes, as well as things like friendship, perseverance in the face of difficulties, the beauty of the natural world, and the connection with my four-legged companion and play meister.

This weekend I’m going to get myself out of the house at least once: I have to take my car to the shop for some routine servicing, so I’m guaranteed to get out anyway, but I also know that I need to be sure to connect with the world, even if it’s only briefly. Last weekend the two sisters with whom I most frequently spend time with on weekends were both out of town over the weekend. And even though it’s possible that I would not have spent time with either of them, knowing that I couldn’t talk to or hang out with them was remarkably affecting. I spent the majority of the weekend talking to myself, to God and to the dog, and none of the conversations were particularly satisfying. So my goal for this weekend is to get out and at least interact with the world a little bit. I am working on developing other activities that will get me out and interacting with other human beings on a weekly basis. I miss volunteering, which presents at least one possibility, and I am thinking about other things I can do to get myself occupied and out in the community.

I am grateful for this upcoming weekend. I need to refuel and refresh in preparation for next week, which will be full of meetings and numerous hectic activities and projects. It’s exhausting but good. It has been a long time since I included the night time prayer in my blog, but tonight feels like a good time for me to contemplate on it and post it.

Some days I take the basics for granted, but not most days, not any more. I went through a stretch when I sometimes didn’t have much in the way of groceries in my refrigerator. On those days I figure out how to eat  something and prepare something for my son, who lived with me at the time. I was able at times to bring home produce from the Berkeley Food Pantry where I worked as a volunteer once per week handing out groceries to families in the local community. I was grateful to be able to serve the community every Wednesday at the Pantry, and likewise grateful to be able to occasionally bring some food home for our family. Food is a basic necessity that many people in the country have to periodically (or frequently) go without. I am grateful that, though there have been times that I’ve occasionally been hungry that I’ve never starved or gone without to the extent that many people do as their daily reality. There’s something wrong with this picture in one of the wealthiest nations in the world.

The other night on ABC news they ran a segment on how they were able to show a married couple with two kids how much money they were wasting on their food bill. In the report they asked the mom how much they spent on groceries and she replied $300 a week, or around $1200 per month. Really? Wow. As I watched the segment I found myself thinking about the families at the pantry who came a couple of times per month to get a couple of bags of groceries. I thought about how far that one family’s $300 per week would go for some of the families we served in the pantry. They went on to show the family how much of the food they purchased or prepared ended up being tossed into the garbage. It was pretty amazing to watch and to think about in terms of how much food the average U.S. American family throws out.

Now that I’m working full time again and commuting in the evening I have been too tired to find a new volunteer opportunity like I had at the Berkeley Food Pantry. I’ve done some online investigations of a place or two in the area, but haven’t done an exhaustive search. And with my schedule at the moment I spend most of my weekend time recovering from the week. Still, I’d like to find a place and then carve out time and energy to volunteer at least every so often. I miss my friends at the Pantry–such good people doing such important work. I am grateful for the many lessons I learned from the year I spent volunteering there. Most notably, I was able to see and experience what the face of hunger in that community looked like and it wasn’t what most people might expect.

My journey of the past few years hasn’t been easy, but I have learned a lot about myself and about the world around me and I’ve grown to truly appreciate all the good things that surround me, the blessings that I enjoy in my life. I confess that I am ready for life to get a bit easier for me, but until it does I’ll continue to do my best to approach each day with a sense of gratitude.  Thank you for being on this journey with me. I hope you continue to be inspired to pay attention to and be grateful for the many wonderful things that surround you. May it be so.

Tonight I am grateful for the wisdom that comes with age and experience. Last night I participated in an event honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. I had been asked to offer a few closing thoughts and acknowledgments on a program that had featured welcoming remarks, a musical performance, a keynote speech, and awards. Throughout the day I had given some thought as to what I might say and jotted down a few notes and some MLK quotes that I wanted to use, but as I sat in the audience waiting for the program to begin, then as I listened to the keynote speech and other activities I was stunned to realize that virtually none of the speakers, including the president of our institution, had been alive when Martin Luther King walked the earth. Except for me.

As I took my place at the podium in front of the microphone, determined not to squint into the glare of the spotlights, I recounted a story from my childhood of what it was like in my family’s household the night Martin Luther King was assassinated. I looked out over this audience largely filled with college students who are younger than my children and work colleagues for whom I am the same age as their mothers and aunties, their older sisters, etc. One of the young professors who spoke talked about her father who had been born in 1950. 1950? I was born in 1957. It made me proud, I told the audience, to see the work that Dr. King had died for, the work that both of my parents did in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and even my own work over the past 30 years in higher education bearing fruit in the personages of the young, passionate, talented college students and young professionals that were in that crowd.

As I headed out on my commute home, I called my younger sister–four years my junior–and asked her, “When did we get old?” She laughed and replied, “We’re not old!…Are we?” I laughed too because in every way except the number listed on my birth certificate and driver’s license I feel like I’m no more than 30. But of course that’s impossible…the young professor who spoke last night, she’s probably about 30, 35 tops. This morning, as I was recounting this story to one of the students who works in our office she assured me, “You’re not old!” (Which was very kind of her because I am likely to be a good 10 to 15 years older than her mother!)

The truth is, I don’t feel old, but suddenly I realize that I have become an elder–in a sense my body and chronological age has caught up to where my spiritual and emotional maturity has been for many, many years. While I am perhaps a little wiser than I was 25 or 30 years ago, now I finally look the part. I believe that eldership (the crone phase in adult womanhood) carries with it a weight of responsibility and at the same time a curious sense of liberation. It’s the responsibility to lead, teach, and guide without the pressure of having to be in charge of everything, no longer the same need to have to prove oneself. It’s the ability to say, “I’ve lived a while now and I’ve experienced some things, and I have a thing or two to tell that you might want to listen to.”

Generally speaking I have always had a healthy respect for my elders. I spent more time as a child and young person hanging out around and listening to adults than with kids my own age. As a teenager I occasionally found myself being asked for my opinions on things and at times even for guidance from some of the adults around me. It felt completely natural to me. As I got older and began working with college-aged students I gradually began the shift toward eldership and gaining the respect of the young people while also being relatively “cool” for someone my age. And although at times I embarrassed my kids, both they and their friends humored me when I asked them to explain the jargon and lingo of the day. Working with and around high school and college students kept me on my toes and able to communicate effectively with young people even though I was the same age as their parents.

It remains a fairly odd sensation to me to now be closer to 60 than 50–I can no longer claim to be “middle-aged.” Even though my grandfather lived to be 100, I think it highly unlikely that I’ll be able to stretch myself out to 112. I’m grateful to be who I am and where I am. I still have some challenges with where I find myself situated at my age. In some ways I feel like I’m starting from scratch in terms of where I thought my life would be at this age. But one can never fully predict where they are going to end up at a particular time, so I reckon I simply am where I am for this time, on this day, in this moment. And in a sense I am exactly where I am supposed to be. For now, that’s good enough for me.

Tonight I started out on a completely different subject and came to a screeching halt, deciding to go a different way. It happens periodically. That’s why one of the little things I am grateful for with the advance of technology is the ability to save the document should I ever care to come back to that subject matter, or I can use the delete key, as I often do when I start writing something that doesn’t come out quite right. It’s quite a bit different from when I was working on my master’s thesis that I had typed by hand. Yes folks, that was before computers. I paid one dollar per page and $1.25 per pages with tables or charts. The woman who typed it did so on an IBM selectric typewriter. You can imagine then that when a mistake was found or when I had to make edits on my thesis, she had to type whole sections over again. There was no deleting and inserting lines, etc. And let me tell you the correcting selectric was state of the art at it’s time–it even had a correction key. Wow! Ten years later I was typing my own doctoral dissertation on my Mac computer. Making changes then were significantly easier, even though that was before the days of the internet (remember Mosaic and the World Wide Web?) and research was still done in the library. Oy, the dinosaur age.

I am grateful for the technology that allows me to easily write and rearrange and post pictures and YouTube videos in this blog. But with all the tools I have at my disposal, I am still at the mercy of my muse; whether I am clicking away on my laptop keyboard or writing longhand with pen and paper, the words still come from me. Tonight I exercised the power to change my mind and alter my trajectory. I didn’t like the tone of the the first blog I was drafting. It had a bit of an edge to it that I didn’t like and wasn’t feeling. Well I was feeling the edge but felt like it wasn’t what I wanted to share. A gratitude blog should be just that, a sharing, a telling of the stories of things I am grateful for, the whys and wherefores. It is not a space for being cranky. I hear the voice of my mother in the back of my head, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything.” Since some days not saying anything isn’t an option–particularly for a daily blog–that leaves it to me to alter my frame and shift the energy and the trajectory of the piece.

Tonight I am grateful for the power that rests in my hands, the power to do and speak of good things. It does not mean that things are always fun and easy and happy, things can be tough. But each day, in each moment really, I make a choice about how I am going to approach the tough as well as the easy, the sad as well as the joyful, the simple as well as the complex. Some days I might not have it in me to write a totally upbeat and positive blog, but most days I will. Because no matter how hard a day has been (and yesterday, for example, was hard) I still control whether or not I’m still standing strong and unbroken at the end of it. It’s good to know I still got it. And when I feel a sense of fear or worry come over me, I repeat the assurance from  Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” May it be so!