{gratitudinous: a november exercise}

When it finally decides to stop lollygagging, time does not play. September dragged her limp skirts in the dust, and then, record skip, all of a sudden, November, and I’m groping in the dark velvet bag of early evenings and late mornings, desperately fumbling after gratitude.

To paraphrase a line from a TV show, this past summer has been “a bully of a season” which won’t stop trying to step on the back of my shoe, give me wedgies and fling spitballs into my hair. I would really like to hip-check said bully into traffic, but it keeps changing faces, and it keeps coming back. I hear it’s the same with you, in so many tiny, vicious ways.

And yet, there’s gratitude to be found in the dissection of our annoyance, in the intersection of our drowning and our fear. There’s gratitude to be found in the CPR we perform on our souls, restarting our hearts, restoring our breaths. It’s here, in the last bitter draughts of the thing we thought we’d never choke down. It’s here, in the 3AM wakefulness, in the fretful twisting of the soul as we wonder when, where, how we’ll move past this moment. It is here – and thus we will stay here, we’ll stay in the moment. We’ll find it, this gratitude that sometimes eludes us.

Not everything is a grace, not everything is something we can look on with pride, with joy, but this very choice is left to us – and the final choice, the one in which we choose… In the words of Victor Frankl, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” That we have – that is always with us. So, we choose our act, and choose to act, in gratitude.

So thanks for that. For the exercise and the observation. For the necessity and the need, creating the practice. We’ll take it.