You don't know how the story ends
I received a thank-you note today from a friend who claimed she was nervous about sending me a thank-you note because she considers me the "Queen of The Thank-You Note." As I held her card and considered this, I wondered if there were any title in the world (other than "Mommy") that could make me happier. More than any other writing form, it occurred to me, I love the thank-you note. Taking the time to write down what I appreciate about another person, to simmer in that gratitude word by word, and then send it off in a pretty little envelope to arrive into that person's hands just makes me feel good.
I have my mother to thank for this discipline that has become a bedrock of my being. She insisted not only that I be grateful in writing, but that I be memorable, creative, and downright original. Seated at the kitchen table, for example, drowning in a sea of bat mitzvah thank-you notes, hand cramped and mind exhausted (How many different ways can you say "Thanks for the cash" to a friend of your grandparents who you don't actually know?), I answered to my mother, my gratitude drill sargeant. If a card didn't say something specific about what I appreciated about the gift and why I was glad that person had come to my bat mitzvah, (Yes, she reviewed each one) it was rejected and I had to start again.
Given what we went through–her demand for perfection, my complicated desire to please mingled with teenage resentment–it is surprising that today, at the age my mother was when we labored together in my first gratitude marathon, I am a disciple of the thank-you note, humbly in service to its small gesture that routinely breaks my heart open.
How did it happen? I'm not sure.
The girl I was at that kitchen table could only see the struggle, the imposition of my mother, the burden of responsibility. And yet, the work that girl did, card after card after card after card became a kind of transportation toward the woman she would become. She didn't know how the story would end. And she didn't care. All she wanted was to be done with her thank-you notes so she could get on with the dramas of life as a thirteen-year-old.
There is some alchemy that can happen despite us–taking us through the fire of our resistance through the abrasive discipline of our effort until we arrive at something pure and true and so obviously authentic, despite the fact that we never knew it.
I thought my marriage was one thing, but it turned out to be something else. All of the hard work and deep love that went into that commitment have not washed me up on the shore I expected. There were binders full of book outlines on my shelf–books I was convinced I was destined to write–until they landed in the recycling to make space for the new outlines coming through. Where might all of that effort of imagination and intention actually be steering us, if not where we wanted to go?
I don't know how this story ends, or even what direction it might take next. The unassuming thank you note soldiers on, my faithful master and servant, asking only that I hold one moment at a time before releasing it. Expecting nothing more than that.
