Lessons in Gratitude

This evening I find myself missing people. Like, I realized that I haven’t spoken with my brother in a few weeks. For a while there we Skyped on a semi-regular basis. In the hustle and bustle that has become my life these days it took me until just now to realize I’ve been missing that contact with him. Apparently I’m not alone in missing people. The other evening one of my sisters called me and said that as she was climbing into her car to drive home from work she’d thought she might call Daddy to ask him something and see how he was doing. Daddy died two years ago. For that one moment, that habit, that thought, that cellular memory of calling him on her way home was right there, present. “It hasn’t happened for a while, that I’ve thought about calling him, and it hardly ever happens with Mommy anymore.” She told me. Mommy died 17 years ago.

Missing people is a natural part of the human condition. People come into our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime, the poem says. With all the comings and goings, people drifting in and out we don’t always have time to evaluate who falls into which category. When my husband left and divorced me many years ago, I was stunned. I had not known what I was going to do with and for myself, raising our two children largely on my own. I had thought this was a lifetime relationship, so when our marriage ended, I was confused. I have since come to realize that our is a lifetime relationship. For one thing, we are connected through our children, and for another, much to my surprise and joy, we’ve become and remained good friends. That friendship is likely to last for the rest of our lives. The relationship morphed, and as I think about it in hindsight, he came into my life for a reason and for a lifetime.

I am grateful for so many of the people who have found their way into and often out of my life. When they go, no matter how they departed, it is inevitable that I miss them in some way or another. When my mother died, I was devastated–I’d felt as though I’d been orphaned, though my father was still alive. My primary parent and the center of my small solar system had departed and that left me reeling. She was a lifetime relationship, but unfortunately her lifetime was much shorter than I’d hoped it would be. I believe I’ve finally gotten to a point where I don’t miss her acutely like I used to, and now sometimes days go by when I don’t even think about her at all. Still, she’s never gone for too long and she doesn’t go very far. As with Daddy, I wake up in the mornings and they’re both still gone and I really am an orphan.

There are people I miss whom I wish I didn’t and others who have drifted away quietly and return only once in a great while, leaving me wondering how they are and what they’re up to. Perhaps I am conscious of missing people because I now live alone, at least in terms of being absent human company. It’s much easier to think about and notice who’s not there when everyone’s not there (or no one is there as the case may be.) It makes me that much more grateful for the people who are in my life currently who surround me, embrace me, make me smile. Whether they’re here for a reason, season, or lifetime, I’m grateful to have them with me in and for this moment. Their presence is a gift and a blessing; one which I do not take for granted. I will embrace them while they are here now and be grateful.

This has been a good day. On good days it is easy to be grateful; one need only look around, without even breaking a proverbial sweat, to find numerous things about which one can be grateful. Other than the alarm ringing too early this morning and my starting my blog a little later than I’d planned this evening, I can say that overall it has been a good day. I was reminded earlier that I work with a number of really good people. My coworkers are thoughtful, passionate about their work, creative and energetic among many other attributes.  As is the case whenever and wherever you have humans involved in any endeavor, there are the occasional misunderstandings and challenges that  confront people in relationships of all kinds. I’m sure our workplace is unexceptional in that regard. But today, as in weeks past, I’ve so appreciated my colleagues’ willingness to come together around a table to think and plan and engage with one another in dialogue around various issues.

Some people have said to me that I am in the “honeymoon” phase at work and that of course with less than two months on the job everything is going to move along swimmingly. The implication, of course, is that eventually the positivity and the novelty of being the new person will wear off and…well, I’m not sure what happens “when the honey runs out and the moon goes down,” but whatever it is isn’t good. I’ve pretty well decided to buck that particular belief.  These days my mode is to approach life, as best I can, with a sense of optimism and with the highest good intended for everyone I encounter over the course of the day, even those with whom I have difficulties or by whom I feel most challenged. I haven’t run into anyone who really falls into that category as yet. While my hope would be to maintain good relationships with everyone I encounter, I recognize that this isn’t terribly realistic. Nonetheless, it is something to strive toward just in case I might actually accomplish it.

In addition to having a good day at work, I had a number of very sweet encounters with family today, beginning with a text message from one of my sisters telling me that she loved me and that I will always have a special place in her heart. It was an unexpected note, popping up on my phone unsolicited, and brought such a warm feeling and put a big smile on my face. Shortly thereafter my daughter called me. She seemed surprised when I answered the phone; she’d expected to get my voicemail as she was calling in the middle of the work day. “I just called to say, ‘I love you.'” she sang to me from the other end of the phone. My big smile came back. And later, after a long day at work to receive a phone call from my son for the second time in the last few days was the cherry on top.

There can be no better gift, no greater blessing than to know and be told that you are loved. Being told makes the knowing doubly sweet. It takes all the guesswork out of it. Today I received the message loud and clear from multiple directions, not solely from family, that “yes, you are loved and appreciated.” I am grateful beyond measure for that. I know it sounds corny, but I wholeheartedly believe that the world really does need “love, sweet love.” And yes, it is “the only thing that there’s just too little of…”

As I’ve gotten older I think perhaps that I have fewer doubts about a lot of things. If there is one thing about which I have no doubt it is that I am loved. I won’t put any qualifiers on it; too often the fact that we are loved by someone isn’t good enough if they are not the someone we want to love us. Given that there are people in this world who feel as though no one loves them, I am grateful to be surrounded by love from all the places I receive it.  As best I can, when I walk through the world I send love out to the people around me. I try to live my life with my arms wide open. At times I fail miserably, but if I set the intention to bring more love into the world, it is far better to try and fall short than it is to not try at all. I figure every little bit helps. And if in fact I succeed, even in small ways on a small scale, the world is nonetheless that much better. And that is a good thing.

I am grateful that the mercies of god are new every morning. No matter what kind of day I’ve had, no matter how challenging, exhausting, painful, sad or wonderful, joyous, amazing, remarkable, each day begins fresh each morning. This is a good thing. Sometimes I am so tired at the end of a day that it’s all I can do to put together coherent sentences for this blog and crawl into bed. But barring unforeseen circumstances, when I wake up the next morning there they are–a new set of mercies waiting for me. Thank goodness.

Tonight is one of those evenings when I am pretty tired. As usual I hauled a bunch of files and papers home with me from work with every intention of looking at them and preparing for an important meeting tomorrow afternoon, but as often happens, I am too tired to do much with them. I have done some thinking about what I hope to cover, which is often a good thing. But I didn’t pull out all my papers and such and do anything with them. I’ll start back on it tomorrow morning when I have a fresh set of mercies to work from.

Humans can be so driven by accomplishment. The other day I wrote about my not having crossed much off of my to-do list and asking myself if I felt bad about that. What a question! Sometimes we are so goal and accomplishment-oriented that we scarcely pay attention to much else. I come from a family of overachievers. Each of us–my siblings and I–in a variety of ways were pushed to achieve and excel academically and professionally. Our parents–Mom in particular, at least in my case–stayed on us to get good grades and pushed us in the direction of academic endeavors beyond what we would likely have pursued for ourselves. I would probably not have pursued and attained my Ph.D. had my mother not strongly encouraged me to go after it. And while it has proven to be a good thing to have it, I also felt I lost something in the pursuit of the degree. I was doing it more for someone else, for my mother, and less for myself.

Accomplishments are good, achievement is good, as long as they are in balance with other areas of our lives. I am grateful for what I have managed to accomplish professionally in my life, and I am equally grateful for for all the things that enrich my life immeasurably but have no particular practical value. I taught myself how to play the guitar and learned how to put words and music together to write songs. While this has served to entertain and inspire a reasonable number of people over the years, it probably won’t go down as my single most important achievement. And yet, the pure joy that playing and singing and entertaining people has given me over the years has been priceless. There are other examples like this where small accomplishments paid big dividends often in ways that are difficult to measure but important nonetheless.

I am grateful that I have reached an age where accomplishment is weighted very differently than it was when I was younger. It’s not that people no longer expect great accomplishments from me; it’s more that those things are less important to me than they once were. I no longer bend under the pressure to achieve great things. I am satisfied within myself at what I have done with my life. There are things I still hope to accomplish, other hills to climb so to speak. But I am grateful for who I am and where I am and what I’ve done up to this point in my life. That is a very good thing.

It is a little after 8:30 p.m. EST and I am in my jammies in bed. It has felt like a very lonnnnngggggg but mostly good week. I am relieved that the weekend is here, though I have some work I need to do. I am grateful for the week just past.

I will not write much tonight. I am exceedingly tired having gone to bed after 12:30 last night and rising around 6 a.m. this morning. For the first time on my commute home I was seriously sleepy. Fortunately it didn’t really hit me until I was off the highway, but it was still a little unnerving nonetheless and I thanked God with the sincerest gratitude for getting me home safely. While I am grateful for that every day, I was particularly so this evening.

I will be going to sleep soon, having turned off my alarm with no intention to set it for tomorrow. Given that I have fallen asleep a few times since I started this blog, I am going to close with the promise of writing a slightly more coherent post tomorrow. I will end by offering the night time prayer from the New Zealand Prayer Book:

Every weekday evening at the end of the workday, I take the five-seven minute walk to my car, each step pumping myself up to undertake the evening commute. On Monday and Tuesday of this week it was an uncharacteristically short 55 minutes. On Wednesday it was back to an hour and 38 minutes. So tonight when I checked the route on Google maps it told me the trip was going to take one hour and 28 minutes, which is around what it normally takes these days. Sighing, I walked to my car hauling my backpack and lugging a box. I went through my pre-commute rituals then headed down the street toward the interstate.

I had been on I66 East for about a half mile when I saw it: an enormous, round, peach-colored orb of light hovering just above the roadway off in the distance. What was that? Oh my god, it’s the moon. Okay, you can call me a nerd, a romantic, a literal lunatic, but I love the moon (and the planets and the stars…) And for that brief stretch of the commute I was totally mesmerized, not thinking about how tired I was, about any lingering thoughts leftover from the workday, or the long stretch of red taillights I saw ahead of me. For just those few moments it was me and the the rising moon. I once again found myself wondering why it’s always seems so huge when it’s first rising and why it’s sometimes a deep orange or peach or some variation of red, then it becomes that rich milky whitish color we’re used to seeing. How does it do that?

I am grateful not simply for the beauty of the moon, I’m grateful for the wonder.

This morning on my commute in to work I was listening to the radio so I could get a sense of what the traffic would be like further up on the beltway–part of my morning commuting ritual. As I was waiting for the “traffic on the 8s” to come on I was listening to the morning national news roundup. I only half listen to the news sometimes, not wanting any major glumness to start my day off with negativity (this was particularly true in the weeks leading up to the national elections.) The newsperson started in on a story about a person who “captured” a picture of a New York City police officer. I was waiting for the reporter to say it was a picture of the officer beating a defenseless person or harassing someone or other reprehensible behavior. I braced myself for the bad news. It didn’t come. It turns out that the person captured a picture of the officer bending down to help a homeless man put on a new pair of boots that the officer had just bought for him. It seems the cop had noticed that the man had blisters and sores on his feet and, aware that it was also freezing cold in the city had decided to go into his own pocket and buy the homeless man the new pair of boots.

I literally gasped at the completely unexpected “punch line” of the story, my eyes immediately filling with tears. I had done a complete 180 degree shift so fast that I was totally discombobulated by it. It took me a few moments to catch my breath and gather my wits that had been scattered throughout the inside of my car. I didn’t totally take leave of my senses and I was very much in control of my vehicle, but my heart had swelled almost to bursting. I’m not sure how many times I said, “Oh God,” before I finally recollected myself and got back to the business of transporting myself to work. I was not simply grateful for the story or the kindness of the officer, I am grateful for the wonder of it.

Every morning as I am concluding my daily journal writing, I write out some of the time honored well-wishes of Buddhist lovingkindness meditation: may I be filled with lovingkindness, may I be peaceful and happy, may I be safe and protected, may I be healthy and strong in my body, mind and spirit, may I live with joy, ease, and wellbeing. I often add: may I be filled with compassion. And I extend those wishes out to all my family and friends, to my acquaintances and people with whom I have difficulties, and ultimately to everyone everywhere. I try to live as best I can in a space of openness to the possibilities, to open my hands to let go of what I need to let go of and free my hands and arms to “let come” to embrace the life around me. Whether it’s a incredibly generous act of care and kindness between two unlikely people or the awesome, spellbinding beauty of a near perfect full moon, I am grateful for the wonder that is available and accessible all around me.

I don’t experience the sense of wonder every day; in some ways I wish I did, though I’m not sure my heart could stand it. Nevertheless, I am grateful to have the experience of it from time to time. So, so grateful. May our lives be filled with wonder and may we have the awareness to experience that which is all around us. So be it!