Lessons in Gratitude

The first haiku I’ve attempted since high school. How about it? I owe this to my sister, with whom I was chatting on Facebook a bit earlier. She’s traveling and was sitting in a hotel room in Chicago a little too wound up to wind down. So she was on Facebook having just posted about watching the eagles nest (one of our favorite past times.) I had just gotten off of a Skype call with our brother a little while earlier, so clearly this is family night for me. I was lamenting that I needed to write this blog and wasn’t feeling quite up to it.

Almost before I could write that I didn’t know the “formula” for a haiku and hadn’t written one since high school, she typed in the chat window, “5-7-5” which of course meant little to me. I thought it was word count, not the number of syllables. (Thank goodness for Google…) Thus, in a matter of a few brief moments, I had constructed the masterpiece above, my haiku titled, “Gratitude Speaks.”

I’ve decided that the haiku and the conversation leading up to it is probably a lot more interesting than what I was going to write. The truth is, today’s been a bit of a struggle and sometimes on days like this, it’s all I can do to muster a modicum of enthusiasm to write about gratitude. As always I am grateful today for many things; and as I’ve written before, gratitude doesn’t falter or fail or take days off, only the writer does. Sometimes the warm, gentle glow of gratitude gets lost in the white-hot, glaring stadium lights of life’s trials and tribulations. The peaceful, gentle lapping of gratitude’s waves against the shore of my consciousness gets drowned out by the clashing, clanging cacophony of the noise of doom and cataclysm of past due bills and empty larders…..well, you get the point.

In spite of everything, I am grateful for so many things, too numerous to count really. More than anything, tonight I am grateful for loving family, for siblings who love and care enough to call me on Skype just to see how I’m doing or who stay up late offering helpful suggestions to help a cranky writer find her words again.  And for my kids for whom I still drag myself out of the bed each day, even though they are not children any more. I am grateful for them–who they are and who they are becoming. Look out world.  They make my world go around–my family and friends.

Tomorrow starts a new month, and is the anniversary of my moving away from my home of six years. It was pretty much the last significant blow in the series of losses in 2011 I now cavalierly refer to as my “series of unfortunate events.” In some ways I’m still very much finding my footing and am still recovering from being put out. But, I am grateful to still be standing–knees wobbling, hands shaking, head spinning–and soldiering on.

It’s been a long time since I started writing my blog from the Park. It was nice to be back there, and the weather was just about perfect. Because I was sick last weekend I’d been unable to walk and take the dog to the Park. It was good to be there and I find that I miss going there the three to four times per week I used to go. I am nonetheless grateful to spend at least one day per weekend there.

I woke up this morning in a pretty good frame of mind. I wrote in my journal, had my coffee, and had a “meeting” with my son  to talk about his future. I think we made some progress, but we still have a way to go in order to help him reach the kind of clarity that I believe he needs. Of course I’ve always recognized how much easier it is for me to help other people achieve clarity in their lives than it is for me to achieve it in mine. This has long been true for me as I have acted as an advisor/counselor to many people throughout most of my life. It has remained true in the years since I’ve become a life coach. Who helps me settle my life issues? I’ve always been kind of a loner in that. At this juncture I’d be happy to identify a mentor or  coach who could help me navigate these waters of figuring out my life rather than trying to navigate them myself. Where is Mister Miyagi when you need him?

Learning to navigate the whitewater that is my current life has been interesting. I’ve never gone river rafting (and as a non-swimmer with an irrational fear of water am not likely to take it up any time soon), but from what I can tell it looks like it requires skill, strength, balance, a cool head and maybe a bit of luck. When I picture shooting my life rapids in what looks like a fairly insubstantial rubber raft I would add fearlessness, a sense of wonder at the power of the water, and an adventurous spirit. As I think about my own life rapids, I’m not entirely sure which of the previously listed abilities I possess though I believe I have some of them in pretty good measure. When I think about where things in my life stand at the moment there remain more questions than answers, more that’s unknown and unresolved than what’s clear and settled. I’m in the raft, sometimes furiously paddling with all my strength and other times praying and holding on for dear life lest I tumbled out and bounce downriver sans boat. As much as I look forward to reaching the calmer part of the river, I believe I still have a little more bumpiness before things smooth out. My task is to hang in there and roll with things as best I can.

I’m grateful for the lessons I’m learning on this journey. The “teacher” has appeared off and on throughout the last few years. If I look for a traditional, wise-looking sage or mentor, I am likely to miss whatever person or circumstance has shown up in my life to teach me what I need to know in a given moment about a given situation. Sometimes I have waited for the teacher to appear and the teacher ended up being me, as my own intuition on a given situation provided me the answer I was seeking. I do get weary, so weary at times of battling the currents. Sometimes I let go and let the water carry me where it will. Other times it is my task to stay on course, even if that means fighting against the current. My main hope at such times is that I’ll know when to fight and when to let go. Perhaps my Mr. Miyagi will show up and give me some pointers.

Sometimes you can just tell from the start what kind of day it’s going to be. This morning as I wrote in my journal, I could already feel a building sadness. “I will likely cry sometime today,” I predicted, “I feel it coming on…” And sure enough, later in the day, I indulged myself in a pretty decent cry. I do that from time to time and imagine that this trend will continue for a little while as I learn to roll with whatever life might send my way. I am learning to navigate here in the dark, where I can’t see the path in front of me further than a step or two. I am adapting to the not knowing, learning to trust some instinct that I’m headed in the “right” direction toward something good even though I have very little awareness of what that is. And, importantly, I am moving forward, taking action rather than plopping down in the middle of the darkness having given up and swearing to go no further.

All this is interesting, metaphorically speaking, but what does it mean in real life? Well, every day I get up with an intention of taking an action in some direction toward improving my lot in life. Sometimes, getting up in the morning is the action, but usually I do manage to accomplish a little bit more than that. Sometimes I take tiny baby steps and others are nice leaps forward, though I confess it’s been a while since I’ve taken a nice leap toward improving my life. I am perhaps overdue. So even though when I woke this morning I knew I would cry sometime today, and I did, I also managed to get a few things done–this blog being one of them, as it is every night. I am grateful to have this opportunity at the end of the day to see if I can honestly sum up what unfolded and approach it from the perspective of gratitude and appreciation. It isn’t always easy to do that, and sometimes what I write reflects the struggle to get something, anything out in the blogosphere. But however it turns out, it is an offering–to the faithful readers for sure, but more so to myself and for anyone “out there” whether they read this blog or not who is struggling to find ways of dealing with what life is throwing at them.

I am hard pressed to describe this phenomenon adequately, as it is just coming to me–this idea of an offering. I suddenly had a Catholic moment that took me back to my early childhood and the prayer, “Morning Offering.” I remember of the line, “I offer you my prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day…” It includes a lot of other stuff which I no longer profess, but I resonate with the idea that whatever unfolds over the course of the day is something that can in a sense be offered back to God or the Universe or whomever one might wish to offer it to. It is a way of saying “Today I have done my best with what I was given. I am grateful for this day and all that happened in it, no matter what it was or how it looked or how it turned out. Tomorrow will provide me another opportunity.”  And so it shall.

Today I am simply grateful for the close of another week. They flash by with such speed these days there’s little else to do but be grateful for their closing. As often happens, this week presented me with a mixed bag of emotions from worry, anxiety, and sadness to calm, delight, and thoughtfulness and many emotional states in between. In that regard, it was a typical sevenday. Years from now I’ll go back and read this blog and my morning journals (which now number a few hundred pages) and shake my head at what I recorded of these days of my life drama. I will look back in gratitude at how I made it through a particularly rough patch while managing to maintain a semblance of sanity and steadiness. Because as shaky as I have felt over the past many months, at the core of my being I am rock steady and I know it. How I know it is somewhat irrelevant. What’s true is that I can feel it in my bones. And for that I am beyond grateful.

I am grateful for a lot of simple things tonight: like going to work today after having put in only a couple of hours for the entire week. Things had slowed down and there was little for me to do, so I wasn’t able to put in any hours. and when one doesn’t put in hours, one doesn’t get paid. So right at the end of the week on Friday–a day I don’t normally go in to work–I was able to put in a few hours of work and earn a little income. It was good to have something to work on and get back onto a project that had been nearing completion before circumstances beyond my control slowed the whole thing down eventually bringing it to a halt.  So I was quite happy when the information that we’d been waiting for for nearly two weeks finally came in and I was able to resume the process of completing the project. And just when I was somewhat anxious about both of my projects beginning to draw to a close, it appears that a new project is coming up that will guarantee work for another period of time, perhaps another month or so.

As I’ve observed before, sometimes things have gotten incredibly tight and I haven’t known how I was going to do all that I needed to do. But every time I’ve needed something to meet an obligation or need, what I’ve needed has appeared. I am learning to relax and lean into the uncertainty of this current life and be alright with it. So far I seem to be able to do that. It hasn’t been easy, but nothing much has been these days. And I’m building the muscles of faith that will continue to strengthen as the weeks fly by.

On Monday I celebrated my 55th birthday. I’ve been around on the planet for a while. Yet, I feel very much like a work in progress. I definitely have wisdom of an elder to share with others about life on this path and yet I still feel like I’m in school learning some basic life lessons. I am learning to be patient with myself in the midst of all this, patient, calm, and gentle with myself. I am grateful for the lessons, even the painful ones because they all contribute to who I am becoming. They are the threads that weave their way throughout the tapestry of my life. I look forward to the day when I can look at the pattern and recognize the message in it. But until then I keep walking out my faith one step at a time.

I am grateful for technology that allows friend and family from around the world to know it is my birthday and Facebook, email, text, and phone birthday wishes. It has been a good, relatively quiet day. I rose early to send my daughter on her way back up to school–her unexpected weekend visit was a lovely early birthday present. Then I wrote in my journal, engaged in my morning ablutions, and cleaned up my bathroom and several cluttered areas in my bedroom as I waited for my son to wake up. He had promised to take me out for breakfast this morning, which he ultimately did. It was quite lovely and we had a fun conversation about music afterward. Then I took him to work and spent a chunk of the afternoon listening to the finale of the audio book I’d been enjoying for the past few weeks (the third in a trilogy and I found myself teary-eyed to be leaving the characters behind.) I was treated to dinner by my friends Mary and Lamar who’d discovered that I’d had pie and ice cream for lunch and was contemplating having cereal for dinner. It was quite unexpected and lovely. I suspect I might have had a somewhat glummer evening had they not intervened.

I am grateful to be ending another birthday in relatively good spirits. I have not been a big fan of my birthday for some reason or other. I’m not sure I’ve ever known how to properly celebrate one’s birthday and was often bemused by and envious of people who really knew how to celebrate and be celebrated on their natal day. I haven’t gotten it sorted out yet, but then I’m only 55–middle age–and so I reckon I still have time to figure it out. All things considered, this has been a good day, and for that I am grateful.

I apologize to regular readers of this blog–I’ve been a bit incoherent over the past few days as I have been battling a cold. I read back through a few recent entries and have thought to myself, “Oh my god what were you talking about here?” I can claim delirium and leave it at that, but I apologize nonetheless. I hope to return to coherence in another day or two! I am grateful for the faithful few who stick with me through good blogs and, well, not-so-good ones, and who spend time each day contemplating the blessings that are present in their every day lives. I have been doing a lot of writing over the past several months–some for public consumption, e.g. this blog, as well as my morning journal writing. These bookend writing experiences both help me prepare for the day and then reflect on its unfolding and all that happens in between. I am grateful for words–written, spoken, sung…all add such a wonderful richness to my existence.

I am likewise blessed by the many wordless experiences I have over the course of a day: listening to the cacophony of sounds outside my window on the first few mornings it was warm enough to leave them open at night, watching with rapt interest as the eagle pair tends to their eaglets in a nest a few thousand miles away, feeling the breezes blowing off the bay and the warmth of the sun as I walk around Chavez park with my dog. These are such moments of grace and peace that language is completely unnecessary and if anything becomes awkward and clunky in woefully inadequate attempts to describe them. Life unfolds moment by moment, and I am grateful for those moments in which I am able to recognize just how blessed I am.