The Logophiles – we wordy girls – shared around this little video after Thanksgiving. It is a beautiful ten minute journey that you will want to make the time to take.
And now for the complaints: I have had an absolutely crap weekend. Friday, my sister went into the ER again, and she’s only sixteen and this is the — geez, we’ve lost count of how many times she’s made the trip. She is on heavy-duty drugs and her kidney continues to teeter ever closer to failing. Thanksgiving Day, I got a package – and I’ve put off working on a second pass of copy editing — and there is nothing like receiving notes from a copy editor to make you feel like an utter fool, and to question yourself with such queries as, “Why can’t I ever keep time straight in my novels? How is it, when I have three degrees in English, that I can still mix up tenses?!”
Scowling through my work while the first snow fell softly, I raged – couldn’t go outside, had too much to do, and anyway, because the wind was pretty high, it was too cold, and people hate driving in that, so that meant friends wouldn’t come in from the city, either. Tech Boy was under the weather, I didn’t get the baking done I wanted, I didn’t feel cosseted and comforted as I felt I needed, because there was no one to feel sorry for me for having to work all weekend. My right elbow, which I injured three years ago Christmas, acts up when it’s cold, and it plagued me again, leaving my fingers uselessly in pins-and-needles. I was dragging and low for two solid days.
So quickly after my month of thanks, so soon after seeing this video, I forgot my mantra: the only appropriate response is gratitude.
Gratitude for the baby sister, who is all things hilarious and annoying in one compact package. Gratitude for adoption, which gives us gifts we didn’t know we needed. Gratitude for the copy editor whose quips remind me of the witty circles in which I travel, and of the gift: I get to write novels and get them published. Gratitude that I have manuscripts, and gratitude that I have copy editors looking at my manuscripts. It could indeed have been otherwise.
Gratitude for the beauty of snow, drifting, and for the trails just waiting to be broken in the pristine white. Gratitude that our bodies respond to hot baths and stretching, and chiropractors.
Gratitude is the only appropriate response. It sometimes takes me awhile to turn a situation over and around and to see where the gratitude belongs, but I suspect that with time, it’ll get easier.
For friends within reach and friends on the other side of the screen; for everyday trials like Monday mornings and flights and low pressure in showers. For dimming lights and lives slipping into rest: gratitude. Yes, really.
Liz let us all know that her friend, Jote, is once again doing 30 Days of Gratitude, and I smiled. The gratitude thing, she is catching, no? Perhaps you’ll join in?