Gratitude

Driving around recently I saw a bumper sticker on a car and the word “gratitude” caught my eye.  it seems to me that one doesn’t see that word on many bumper stickers. It was a small square bumper sticker with small print, and the road grime that covered it made it even more difficult to read.  Luckily, we both caught a light, and so I had a chance to read the full message:

“Gratitude for all there is, and for all there isn’t.”

I am still pondering those ten words days later.  

“Gratitude for all there is” —  It occurs to me that gratitude for what there is is challenge enough.  It is easy to take things, blessings if you will, for granted, and in my experience, though it seems counterintuitive, the more things and blessings I have, the more difficult it becomes to be grateful for them.  That is, the easier it is to take them for granted.

“Gratitude for all there isn’t.” – Well, this is an even greater challenge, to be grateful for what we don’t have.  Of course there are things we don’t have and don’t want, some problem, trouble or disease for instance.  You’d think it would be easy to be grateful for their absence, though of course there is that schadenfreude thing to contend with.  But even more challenging is to be grateful for things we want but don’t have, or that we want more of.

No answers here, but still savoring the thought:

“Gratitude for all there is and for all there isn’t.”

Photo and Text Sunday

Photo taken in Galveston under the Pleasure Pier, which, apropos to the text, was previously the Flagship Hotel pier, until said hotel was seriously damaged by a hurricane and repurposed as an amusement park of sorts.

As to the quote, Bowler was speaking to the unsettling nature of the pandemic, which in many ways has “shuffled the deck” on our lives, or at least caused us to entertain the thought of looking at things differently.

Living Beyond Our Certainties

Listening on a recent run, I heard this quote from Kate Bowler on her Everything Happens podcast, commenting on pandemic life:

“We are being pushed to live beyond our certainties.”

Indeed we are, and it is quite uncomfortable at times, walking out with less than full knowledge and understanding.  But then came the epiphany realized in the next mile — “full knowledge and understanding” was never really a thing, it just felt more like a thing then that it does now.  It occurs to me that my certainties are, or at least in many cases, ought to be like the horizons (okay, hilltops) I focus on as I run – when I get there, I find there is more beyond.

Two Teachers, One Message

From Anthony DeMello:

Student: “Master, what is the secret of your serenity?”

Master: “Wholehearted cooperation with the inevitable.”

From Howard Thurman:

“There is a general notion abroad that the wise man accepts the universe, accepts life.  The notion is sound because it reveals a direct understanding of the most elementary fact of life, namely, that the universe is here and we are in it.”

I like those shorthand reminders – “cooperation with the inevitable” and “the universe is here and we are in it.” 

To these I would add a third:

To carve an elephant, I need not create the block of wood.

Our Lives Have Started For Real

I re-read The Life of a Day by Tom Hennen – https://www.doe.mass.edu/mcas/pdf/2013/259294.pdf – and, after some meandering that took me back to this post from January 28, 2018.

**

From the poem The Life of a Day by Tom Hennen:

“We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t the one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real.”

I read this and, once I got past the guilt of conviction, a couple of things came to mind. 

A Don Williams song: “I got high hopes that tomorrow, is gonna be better than today.  It don’t look like its comin’, I know, buy why not believe it anyway.”

And Matthew 6:34: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

It is so easy to reject or set aside today in hopes of a better tomorrow, especially once you get to, say, 10:00 a.m.  It is easy at that point (sometimes earlier) to tell myself “no, this isn’t the one I’ve been looking for.”  But of course, today is the hand dealt today, and who knows what tomorrow’s hand will be, if it is dealt at all.  So, how do I play this hand?

**

Funny how four years and a pandemic allow you to read something through different lenses.  Here, I am now wondering why I left off the portion of Hennen’s poem immediately below the portion quoted above:

“Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.”

It is, in the midst of it, hard to imagine that any day in the last two years “is going by perfectly well-adjusted….”  And while I, like Don Williams, “have high hopes that tomorrow is gonna be better than today,” today is here, now. And I am still wondering, how do I play this hand.

Sad Songs

Pardon me for a minute while I dwell on sad songs.

I was listening to Mary Gauthier, singer/songwriter, on a recent Broken Record podcast, when this line stopped me cold – “I got holes I can’t fill, and bills I can’t pay.  I’m gonna walk in the water ‘til my hat floats away.” 

Ranks right up there with John Prine’s lines from Sam Stone:

“….There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes….

But the gold rolled through his veins,

like a thousand railroad trains,

and eased his mind in the hours that he chose,

while his kids ran around wearing other people’s clothes.”

Or perhaps Bill Anderson and Jon Randall’s Whiskey Lullaby released by Brad Paisley and Allison Krauss. 

“She put him out, like the burning end of a midnight cigarette.”

I’m not really sure what it is about sad songs, but they deliver such a punch.

Okay, I’m done — for now.