More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
floors. Time passed. In most cases, their pain evolved slowly into help for others. The great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. / I awoke and saw that life was service. / I acted and behold, service was joy.”
This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit. God tells Job, who wants an explanation for all his troubles, “You wouldn’t understand.”
There is one problem with this system, which is that it may be necessary to leapfrog over almost everything you were taught about yourself.
the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.
A sober friend from Texas said once that the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you.
Then I agree to keep my sticky mitts off the spaceship until I hear back. The willingness to do such a childish thing comes from the pain of not being able to let go of something. The willingness comes from finding yourself half mad with obsession. We learn through pain that some of the things we thought were castles turn out to be prisons, and we desperately want out, but even though we built them, we can’t find the door.
But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.
We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It’s all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens, and it’s all part of the big picture. In the face of everything, we slowly come through. We manage to make new constructs and baskets to hold what remains, and what has newly appeared. We come to know—or reconnect with—something rich and okay about ourselves. And at some point, we
...more
Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.
that a good marriage is one in which each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal, and this is true also of our bosom friendships. You could almost flush with appreciation. What a great scam, to have gotten people of such extreme quality and loyalty to think you are stuck with them. Oh my God. Thank you.
When we go from rashy and clenched to grateful, we sometimes get to note the experience of grace, in knowing that we could not have gotten ourselves from where we were stuck, in hate or self-righteousness or self-loathing (which are the same thing), to freedom. The movement of grace in our lives toward freedom is the mystery. So we simply say “Thanks.” Something had to open, something had to give, and I don’t have a clue how to get things to do that. But they did, or grace did.
Gratitude is peace. Maybe you won’t always get from being a brat to noticing that it is an e. e. cummings morning out the window. But some days you will. You will go from being Doug or Wendy Whiner, with your psychic diverticulitis, able to eat only macaroni and cheese, to remembering “i thank You God for most this amazing / day.” You splurge on a pint basket of figs, or a pair of great socks. You begin to feel friendship with your flowering pear tree, an interspecies oneness with it, although we usually keep these thoughts to ourselves, lest they be used against us at the commitment hearings.
Some etymologists think “wow” is a contraction of “I vow,” the short form of “Holy Glasgow. I’vow!” This theory sounds right to me.
Wows come in all shapes and sizes, like people. There are the lowercase wows. These are the times when we sink into something modest that delivers above and beyond. When you crawl between clean sheets after a hard day, you are saved. You feel like you are the best sandwich ever. You’re being taken care of from the top and the bottom, with not a crumb or a lump or a wrinkle. Wow: you can’t believe you felt so low and lonely till you thought to change the sheets.
When all is said and done, spring is the main reason for Wow. Spring is crazy, being all hope and beauty and glory. She is the resurrection. Spring is Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.”
Amazing things appear in our lives, almost out of nowhere—landscapes, seascapes, forgiveness—and they keep happening; so many vistas and so much healing to give thanks for. Even when we don’t cooperate, blessings return to our lives, even in the aftermath of tragedy.
