Day After Day

First thing every morning, I take Bisou outside.

Then I feed her and Telemann, and clean the litter box.

Next I make a cup of coffee, a cup of tea, and some toast. Then I ring the breakfast bell.

Some days the sameness of it all makes me want to pull out my hair...

but other days I am filled with gratitude.

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone

Hiatus

Hard times have come to our family, times that will take all our courage, patience and love to get through.  I am not yet ready to write about this, or about anything else.  But in the meantime, I offer you this luminous talk by David Steindl-Rast, on gratitude.

Thank Heavens for the Downstairs Guest Room

I can barely stand to be in my house these days, and given that winter is still raging outdoors and I have a lifetime's worth of worldly goods to sort through indoors, sometimes I feel on the verge of hysteria.

There are two reasons that being home makes me crazy.  The first is that every single object that my eyes light on--a picture on the wall, a rug on the floor, a plate on the table, a nutpick in the drawer--requires a decision:  to keep or not to keep, and if the latter, to a) throw away;  b) give away (and if so, to whom?); or c) sell (and if so, where?).

The second reason is that, having started the paring process with the bookcases that occupy almost every room, and having actually made some progress, those rooms are now defaced by stacks of book-filled liquor-store boxes that threaten to topple and squash Bisou.  And then there are those poor denuded book shelves, littered by the few volumes that have escaped my ruthless hand and showing, behind where the books used to be, a nine-year accumulation of dust and ashes.  If you are in need of rest and serenity, those rooms are the last place you want to be.

I know only too well that this--the dismantling, the decisions, the packing and the mess--is going to grow steadily worse over the next three  months before the halcyon date of June 2, when we will say farewell to this good house forever.  Three months of difficult decisions in the midst of chaos would normally unhinge me, but there is a chance that I won't lose my mind completely, thanks to the Downstairs Guest Room.

This blessed space has a sofa bed, a little table, an old pine chest, a once-glorious, now-faded rug, some pictures on the wall, a mirror, a good reading lamp, and no bookcase.  I have already decided that everything in this room, except for the pictures on the wall, is going to come with us.  Hence, until the last moment, it can remain in its present orderly state:  no empty boxes waiting to be filled;  no full ones waiting to be taken away, no choices, no angst. 

Every afternoon, when the sun begins to sink at the horizon and my spirits--weary from a day of deciding what to do with my long-abandoned stone carving tools or talking myself out of keeping a particularly soulful piece of pottery--start to plunge, I repair to the Downstairs Guest Room.  I turn on the lamp, dive into my Kindle, and proceed to knit the raveled sleeve of the day's care.

Need I mention that there's also Bisou snoozing on a cozy blanket on my right, and a glass of wine on the little table at my left?  Periodically, as I reach the end of a chapter, I look around and thank the universe for the Downstairs Guest Room, a sanctum where I can rest my eyes from the chaos, and my mind and my heart from the endless task of letting go, letting go, letting go.

Iris On Happiness

The British novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch, wrote, "One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats."  At first this sounds like hedonism with a small "h," possibly resulting in enormous weight gain.  But what Iris is really telling us is to pay attention, and when we do, we discover that most ordinary days are in fact a long succession of small, sometimes tiny but nevertheless pleasurable, treats.

When I was young, I had nothing but disdain for small treats.  I was focused on big ones:  a degree, a job, a mate, a child, a house.  But once those treats are in place, what is left?  One could start all over again:  get another degree, find a new mate, have another child.  But those treats are problematic, and require a lot of energy.

It used to be that people got the big treats and then they died.  Now for most of us there are years and years to fill after the big treats have been bagged. What is left, to ease the string of decades between the age of the big treats and the end of life, is the small stuff.   So it's important to become adept at inventing and identifying small treats for ourselves. 

Sometimes the treats are so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye, and it's a good idea to carry a magnifying lens so as not to miss any that might go unnoticed.  And we need to train ourselves to look forward to our small treats, and then to remember and be grateful for them afterwards.

I stumbled upon this practice all by myself--or perhaps it was divine inspiration--in the darkest times of my CFS.  When the day from dawn to dusk had held nothing but misery and malaise, I would lie in bed in a tangle of frustration, unable to sleep and endlessly rehearsing all the things I hadn't been able to do.  Then one night, to calm myself, I began to go over the last sixteen hours with a mental magnifying glass, starting with getting out of bed in the morning, and noting every single good thing that had happened to me, no matter how small.

It turned out that even a particularly bad day was a succession of continuous small treats.  There were so many, and counting them was so relaxing, that before I knew it I fell asleep.  But while I was going through the process I was amazed at how studded with good things those miserable hours had actually been.

What kind of things? There was the comfort of waking up in a warm house on a cold day, the jade plant blooming next to the sunny window, the spouse's offer to fetch pizza for dinner, the freedom to lie down when I absolutely had to, the dog at my side...these were all, when I focused on them, reasons for happiness and deep gratitude.

In Catholic school we were taught to every night, before going to sleep, make an examination of conscience, reviewing any faults we had committed during the day.  I have since replaced the examination of conscience with the counting of small treats.  The practice of gratitude, because it leads to happiness and contentment and thence to generosity, is just as likely to make me a better person as the awareness of my failings.

So now that the era of big treats is mostly over for me, I lie in bed at night, fingering my day bead by bead, a rosary of continuous small treats.  And long before the end, I always fall asleep.

Saving The Ivories

Just got back from an hour's communion with the spider plant in my dentist's office.  Since I find nothing more boring than talk about teeth--even my own--I will write instead about the spider plant that kept me company while the dentist and his assistant fought the good fight in the tiny battlefield of my mouth.

This was not a spider plant filled with joie de vivre.  It drooped in its hanging pot and was obviously deficient in Dylan Thomas's "force that through the green fuse drives the flower."  It disturbed me because my house is always in danger of being taken over by spider plants.  They ooze vitality and make babies by the dozen, and the minute I put those babies in water they send out thick shiny roots, and then I have to find homes for them. 

Spider plants being famous for purifying the air of pollutants and bad energies,  I wondered if the dentist's plant's failure to thrive was due to the pain and apprehension it was obliged to absorb day in, day out,.  But I'm almost sure that I did not, during my sixty minutes in the chair, personally add to its daily load of negativity.  I was so relaxed that in fact I wrote this entire post out in my mind and thought of a couple more topics to get me through the blogging week.  Plus, I was sending out waves of gratitude the entire time.

I don't like going to the dentist any more than you do, but whenever I'm there I imagine in vivid terms what my life would be like if, as has been the case for the human race during 99.9% of its history, I couldn't go to the dentist--a friendly, clean, well-trained 21st century dentist.  And I am overwhelmed with thankfulness.

In another age, by now I'd be missing a bunch of teeth, some of which would have fallen out as a result of calcium depletion during pregnancy.  But others would have dropped off only after days and nights of the kind of pain that obliterates thought and makes a living creature long for death.  My face would have that sunken look that one sees on witches in fairy tale illustrations, and my few remaining teeth would be crooked, wobbly, and yellow.  I would not be able to eat walnuts, or almonds, or pistachios. 

So I'm grateful that my cheeks are anything but sunken and that my teeth, with the help of dozens of dentists over the decades, are still clinging to my gums.  I'm grateful for the chair that tilts at the touch of a button, the piped in music that matches the blandness of the decor, the face masks, the rubber gloves, and the assistant who asks me if I'm ready for spring.  And I'm grateful for the hard-working spider plant, which looks like it is in urgent need of some spring sunshine.

And now for a negative P.S.:  One thing I am not grateful for is the arm-and-leg cost of all this, which is covered neither by Medicare nor by supplementary insurance.  I am grateful that I had an arm and a leg to give in exchange for having my tooth saved, but it is distressing to think how many people in America can only get this kind of care by sacrificing other necessities of life.

Ingratitude--Bred In The Bone?

As you may have read here, I was afflicted with pretty horrendous shoulder and arm pain during the holidays. Then, after a course of narcotics, and a couple of physical therapy sessions, and healing thoughts sent my way by my yoga classmates, I suddenly got better. Much better.

I was aware of the cessation of pain, and grateful for it. But I was not aware of my new freedom of movement. Motions that had caused me agony--turning over in bed, getting out of bed, putting on my shoes, hugging my spouse--no longer did so. So I just did them, as I always had, without giving them a second thought.

And that is what puzzles me--how easily those things came back, and how little I was aware of them. The minute that putting down the dogs' dishes didn't hurt like the dickens, I put down the dogs' dishes while thinking of something else. The minute my mobility returned, I took it for granted, and went on to other things.

Why did I? Why didn't I stop and bask in gratitude for even a single day? I think it's because I'm human. I suspect that generations of upwardly-mobile ancestors have geared my genes to take the good for granted, and strive like mad for the better. A recipe for discontent, you say? I agree. And a recipe for progress, too, for better or worse.

I saw a TV documentary about the Neanderthals recently. Neanderthals shared a common ancestor with our species and migrated to Europe a zillion years ago. There they settled in caves and made nice stone axes and ate lots and lots of meat. And lived happily in the same way for forty thousand--or was it forty million (I was on pain meds when I watched this)--years. They were grateful for what they had, and saw no need to rock the boat.

Then the homo sapiens types arrived and started improving the cave walls with art and carving little figures of fat women out of bone, and pretty soon the peaceful, contented Neanderthals were history. Next thing you know, it's the Trojan War, followed by the Crusades.

You see what I'm saying? Why can't I just be happy bending over without pain, turning over in bed without groaning? Why must I be thinking about painting on my cave walls, and carving stuff?