Tag: Gratitude

Walking. In gratitude for those working this morning.

Live & Learn35 Comments

1510 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.

While you are all (mostly all) sleeping, and I’m sleepwalking through my morning walk, so many others are working. Working on a early Sunday morning. Picking up our trash, combing our beaches, keeping our parks clean, tending to our sick in hospitals and keeping our communities safe — while we sit and enjoy our morning coffee easing into our day.

Here’s to all of you who keep our world spinning.

And our gratitude.

DK

Notes:

  • More pictures from this morning’s walk here.
  • Post Inspired by D. Nurske from “Riches of the Interior”: “Pity these souls who could not endure our burden of endless gifts.“
  • Post also Inspired by John O’Donohue from Anam Cara: “It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. It is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.” (Thank you Hammock Papers)

I got about 30 more summers left.

Live & Learn25 Comments

As Evelyn Couch said to Ninny Threadgoode in Fannie Flagg’s “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe”: “I’m too young to be old and too old to be young. I just don’t fit anywhere.”

I think about this line often, this feeling of being out of place, particularly in a culture that obsessively glorifies youth and teaches us to view aging as an enemy.

No one really tells us how we’re supposed to age, how much fighting against it and how much acceptance of it is the right balance. No one tells us how we’re supposed to feel when the body grows softer and the hair grayer, how we’re supposed to consider the craping of the skin or the wrinkles on the face that make our smiles feel unfortunate. […]

The actress Jenifer Lewis, appearing on the nationally syndicated radio show “The Breakfast Club,” once remarked: “I’m 61. I got about 30 more summers left.” Since hearing those words, I’ve thought of my own life in that way, in terms of how many summers I might have left. How many more times will I see the leaves sprout and the flowers bloom? How many more times will I spend a day by the pool or enjoy an ice cream on a hot day?

I don’t consider these questions because I’m worried, but because I want to remind myself to relish. Relish every summer day. Stretch them. Fill them with memories. Smile and laugh more. Gather with friends and visit family. Put my feet in the water. Grow things and grill things. I make my summers count by making them beautiful.
I have no intention of raging against my aging. I intend to embrace it, to embrace the muscle aches and the crow’s feet as the price of growing in wisdom and grace; to understand that age is not my body forsaking me but my life rewarding me.

Aging, as I see it, is a gift, and I will receive it with gratitude.

— Charles Blow, from The Beauty of Embracing Aging, (NY Times, June 5, 2024)

Walking. With a very little blow.

Live & Learn51 Comments

1,488 consecutive (almost) days that I’ve been on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. 12 days from 1,500 — more than four years of this Thing.

“And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.” – Ezra Pound

But before I leave the house, I flip through the morning papers. I know better, I do. But can’t seem to resist the rubbernecking. Ukraine. Israel. Gaza. Washington cesspool. China. Russia. North Korea. All feels dark and getting darker – the world’s shadows deepen.

“I could feel hope traveling backward to find us,
to whisper into our chests,
There will be music for you one day.” — Andrea Gibson

Weather app reads 59° F (?), but there’s a brisk wind from the North. Am I in Greenland? Glad I wore a jacket, I zip up.

I walk.

4:30 am. Wildlife is up. Smallest birds with the loudest voices break the silence of early morning. 4 other insomniacs are out sharing this twilight hour, each lost in their own quiet rhythm.

“Birdsong, wind, and waves. 
It requires nothing more than to meet noise with stillness 
and not commentary.” – Martin Laird

I walk.

Continue reading “Walking. With a very little blow.” →

a great secret to happiness

Live & Learn32 Comments

To start today on a path toward enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, consider the possibility that you don’t need to learn anything new. Instead, you may want to unlearn some false lessons that have pervaded the culture over the past few years. The first untruth is that you must know your destination; the second is that a good life is one that minimizes suffering; and the third is that you must know and live your own truth. The Dominican sages and the modern scientists together show that these are all fake news and serious impediments to a happy life.

In their place, I suggest that you start your path of life by repeating each morning these three affirmations:

  1. I do not know what this day will bring, but I will live it the best I can, with an attitude of love and generosity.
  2. I am grateful for the good I experience today, but I do not fear the bad, which is part of being alive and an opportunity for learning and growth.
  3. I do not possess the absolute truth, but today I will seek it with honesty, an open heart, and a spirit of adventure.

…You will notice that all of the modern untruths I’ve identified have one big thing in common: They say you should focus on yourself—your future, your career, your discomfort, your truth. All moral teaching aside, how boring is that? I can think of no better way to miss the awesome majesty of life than to focus egotistically on a psychodrama in which you are the star.

Happy people can zoom out to see and fully enjoy the world around them. But that means standing up to the lie that you are the center of things. That is the essence of humility and a great secret to happiness. We could add one more affirmation to complete the list above: I will focus today on the miraculous world outside myself.

— Arthur C. Brooks, from “Some Dominican Wisdom We Can All Use” (The Atlantic, May 23, 2024). Adapted from the commencement speech delivered on May 19, 2024, at Providence College, a Catholic institution founded by Dominican friars.

Why I Have Decided to Live (High School Student!)

Live & Learn32 Comments

Spoonfuls of moonlight. Cold air. Her knit blanket
tugging at my body to stay.
The fog resting on my shoulders, hugging me.
Summer rain through an open window.
Thunderstorms & how they change the world momentarily
unafraid, or even better, unaware of humans.
Because I left my country broken.
Because I saw the first reflection of myself in a candlelight vigil.
Because I was flickering.
Because we made promises.
Because I can keep trying & no one can stop me.
Peaches.
Stars.
Willow trees.
Acoustic music with a trembling voice.
The kinds of poems that give me shivers.
Trains to nowhere in particular.
Our sweat sweet bodies colliding on wet grass.
Her hands & the way they cradle my heart
as if holding something precious.
August night drives.
Singing along to “Riptide” & eating cherries out of buckets.
Because we promised to return.
To mend a broken thing.
How laughter colonizes the lungs.
To think of myself as something larger than myself.
Because I can love every small thing..

— Kyo Lee, “Why I Have Decided to Live.” (Washington Post Book Club, April 12 2024). Kyo Lee, a student at the Laurel Heights Secondary School in Waterloo, Ontario, won first place in the international High School Writing Contest sponsored by the nonprofit literary publisher Narrative.  Entrants responded to the prompt: “My note to the world.”

Listen to Kyo read her poem here.