Tag: Gratitude

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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A couple of months ago I went back to my alma mater in Colorado. They gave me a little temporary office, and as I went upstairs I thought, Oh, my God, I used to live here. The room next to the room they gave me was my bedroom from a fraught year in my college experience. It was the weirdest thing, because that guy that I was was so ambitious and stupid, so not in touch with how one went about having a writing life. But he was pretty earnest. There was something very wild about being almost 70 and standing there and going, OK, so what that kid wanted to do, you kind of did it. I can’t quite describe it. Also, I started late. The first book didn’t come out till I was 38, so I feel like I’m racing to do really good work in whatever time is left. But in that early time, one of the things that was so beautiful was that my stupid dreams of being a prodigy were obviously not going to happen. So for the first time it was like, All right, what if you don’t have any writing career? What if you’re just, hopefully, a good father and husband? And in that space I found that there was plenty to live for. I’d always secretly thought I was kind of shallow, that I was all ambition. And to find out that shorn of that, I still liked being alive and still felt a lot of happiness? That was very sweet.

— George Saunders, from “George Saunders is No Saint (Despite What You May Have Heard)” by David Marchese (NY Times, January 10, 2026)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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Now that I’m deep in my 80s, I’d like to stay here forever, and I’ll certainly try. I enjoy being here. The decade is the October of aging. And October is a lovely month, don’t you think? […]

Things I can’t do any more: Run. Play basketball or tennis. I also can’t worry myself to death, or I choose not to. Before my October years, there seemed to be nothing, however inconsequential, that I could not stew over until it grew as big and menacing as Godzilla at night. Nothing was too trivial for my troubled mind. No small rejection. Not the slightest slight. I once came up with a rule, “Nobody’s thinking about you — they are thinking about themselves, just like you.” I wrote it but I didn’t believe it. Now I hardly care if anyone is thinking about me, or not. Hardly.

My love of nature has grown much deeper in this decade. I had always felt an affinity with the natural world, but it was general, casual and fleeting. These days you can catch me at the window, gazing in wonder at the East River (estuary technically), and mesmerized by the shapes in the blue-gray water, the welts and eddies, the tides, the invading armies of the waves, the clouds reflected, looking like submerged sheep.

It’s not what you do in this decade that’s so unusual, or what you think, but rather how you think. The air changes in October. I find myself thinking far less selfishly, giving much more of myself to my friends and family. […]

The general improvement is this: In my younger years I was always looking ahead for whatever would befall me. Now I look at what I have. And as those in their 80s appreciate, what one has is considerable. I don’t fear winter, and I don’t regret spring. […]

— Roger Rosenblatt, excerpts “I Don’t Fear Winter, and I Don’t Regret Spring” (NY Times, October 26, 2025)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call: Take 2

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So Stewart (Brand) gave birth to this idea that if we could show the world from the outside, if we realized what an amazing, extraordinary, unique gift that was — this tiny, little planet teeming with life, swimming around in a dead universe, as far as we know.

We still don’t know that there’s any other life in the universe, which is phenomenal, if you think about it. We still don’t know. We might be the only life in the universe. I think about that nearly every day. I think it’s the most sobering thought. I think that should be shouted from the rooftops every day.

That’s my version of seeing the whole Earth from space — getting people to understand that we might be the only life. It might all be on this one place, and bloody hell, shouldn’t we look after it a bit better, then?

Then those things make me constantly think and constantly be grateful for the fact that I’m alive. I remember reading this comment from a New York taxi driver. He’s driving, and he turns to the customer and says, “Oh, life. I’m so glad I got in.” [Laughs.]

I just love the idea that it’s like an amazing show at a theater and you managed to get a ticket to see it. I appreciate that kind of gratitude.

— Brian Eno interviewed by Ezra Klein, from “A Breath of Fresh Air with Brian Eno” (NY Times, October 3, 2025. The Ezra Klein Show)

Brian Eno Portrait by Shamil Tanna @ Pitchfork.com

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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Q: You’d been disillusioned with acting for the better part of 15 years. What was the depression about?

SP: or a long time I gauged the value that a film would have on a good script, a good cast, a good director and a subject that I would want to go see a movie about. Those things were enough for a while. You get older, and you get more aware of the sacrifices. It’s about time, which we don’t get more of. It’s not enough to work with people you respect and like. You want the same thing you find in family. You want to be with people you love, and it wasn’t since Gus Van Sant’s movie “Milk” that I’d had that feeling. So I kept taking these jobs that I thought were good jobs about good subjects with good directors and I was missing my family, my dog, and I said, What the [expletive] am I doing here? I felt like, maybe I’m done with all this. […]

Q: We talked about how in the recent past you struggled with motivation about acting, and also how you can feel a lot of anger at the world. So what gets you up in the morning these days?

SP: I’m not averse to feeling extremely frustrated with the world. “The world”: We know what we’re saying, I think; I don’t want to be grandiose, or I don’t know how not to be. But I don’t even know if I would call what Russia and Putin are up to right now something that I engage in a lot of rage about. I don’t need rage to get me to a clarity of knowing how evil and obscene it is. The frustration is with those who are not willing to be sober enough to recognize our sacred duty to support the defense of Ukraine. But I don’t even call that anger so much. [Penn points to one eye] I wake up every day with this eye clear about the threat to the environment, the anguish people are going through, attempts to figure out how I can be of any value-added. [Penn points to his other eye] And this one is driving me from the time I wake up, and all I see is that this is still a magic trick of a beautiful cosmos and I am gonna [expletive] enjoy it every day — and I do. Sorry to those who would have me do otherwise, but I am feeling great.

— Sean Penn, from Interview by David Marchese: Sean Penn Let Himself Get Away With Things for 15 Years. Not Anymore.” (NY Times, Sept 27, 2025)

Notes:

  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn15 Comments

Gently he grasped the copper handle of the door – the warmth of the mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would discover the hidden depths of human existence, would finally understand that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship of his certain future, and, then – he started opening the door – he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day’s-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars. Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the half-light.

― László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance. Translated by George Szirtes. (New Directions Publishing, June 2002) (via Alive on All Channels)

Notes:

  • DK Photo @ 6:20 am yesterday morning @ Cove Island Park. More photos from yesterday’s walk here.
  • Quote: Thank you Beth via Alive on All Channels
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.