43 Begins

'Surreal days, all of them anymore, but a new year begins and I face it determined to focus on kindness and goodness and gratitude and beauty as always.  My seemingly-adult-life-long fight against depression rages on daily (hourly!) these days, of course, but I can lose a few of those battles and still win the war.  I have little concentration for writing or reading the past couple months, but I  journal a bit, at least, and I can get through about a chapter of a book before finding myself reading more news stories again instead.   I usually write a dozen pages a week and am such a fast reader, but not lately.  (What's turning into this spring's--and at this rate, maybe this summer's--books, then:  Unbroken: A WWII Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand and The Splendid and the Vile:  A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson.)  The lost time between loved ones is what makes me saddest.  I know you know.  I have been writing and rewriting this paragraph off and on for three hours.  Ay yi yi.  'Alternate blog post title tonight:  The Pandemic:  I Know You Know. 

As in my last post, almost every picture I take anymore is taken on my walk to work or my walk home from work--Essential Workers, unite!--as the only other place I've been since March is the grocery store weekly and the post office once.  From what little I see of it on my walks to/from, though, this has been a beautiful spring.  I've missed seeing and smelling Lilacs this year, since there are none along my to/from work-route and I've been skipping longer walks until it feels safer to be outside, but all the other spring blooms have been lovely, and I've appreciated spring--both the fact of it and the specifics of it--more this year than any other.  Birdsong, for example, is especially lovely and welcome in the wee hours when I'm either still struggling to fall asleep at all or awake too early after another night of nightmares.  I have somehow always loved birdsong but never truly appreciated it until this spring--so now, I suppose, I can say I'm truly loving it for the first time.  It is one of the good things I will likely most vividly remember about this anxiety-filled time, the tender sounds of the birds breaking into the darkness.  There have been more than a few days this year I've gone to work on no sleep or two-or-three hours of sleep.  On my days off lately, I sometimes relax enough to fall sleep only after the sun's come up for the day.  Maybe I'd never truly loved mornings until now either.  Maybe even I, then, ever-determined to live looking for the pretty in the rough patches, will now learn right-down-to-the-bones-and-beyond levels of gratitude. 

Take care of yourselves and of each other, Friends.  If we can't be kind to ourselves and to each other during a PANDEMIC, though, really. . . Heaven help us.  And I do think most people are rising to meet the moment.  ♥  I leave you now with not only a flower petal heart,

but also--and this year would be the year I find one--a heart in a roll of toilet paper.  :)

The Book of Good Things

Before she graduated from the university we were both attending in December of 1998, my friend Marylou gifted me with a personalized blank book. It stayed in its place on one of my apartment’s bookshelves for a few months before I decided on its purpose: The fabric-covered book would be my Book of Good Things. I would record in it every night those things that made me laugh, that made me feel comforted, that brought me joy, that showed me I was loved, and that renewed my faith in the world for another day. From the moment I decided to start the book, I found myself approaching my life—and the people and events in it—more optimistically: Of course today will be filled with goodness--because I have to come up with The List tonight!  Determination to look for the good made finding it much easier. 

I quickly learned that a great day was made great by “little” things, those moments that before would have been forgotten or that would have become vague memory blobs along the lines of “I enjoyed college” or “I love my family and friends.” As every student of creative writings knows, “Show, don’t tell.” So I soon saw the significance of documenting details: Funny lines from phone conversations, scenes from movies I wanted to remember, the look on someone’s face during a conversation or a moment of shared silence, the way a certain hug felt, songs and scents that would forever remind me of that day, what came in the mail, what a friend said when we ran into each other between classes. . . . Such small things, but by nightfall they became big enough to make me see that it had been a pretty good day.  On some level, I knew all these things before I started the Book of Good Things, but of course, you don’t really learn something until it’s changed you in some way. One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the wise and wonderful film critic Roger Ebert: “They used to tell us in writing class that if we wanted to know what a story was really about, we should look for what changed between the beginning and the end.” In that regard, my college-era Book of Good Things is the story of how I learned to see. Writing it helped me figure out what mattered.

And the things that make for good days haven’t really changed much for me since childhood, I know now. Give me someone to love and someone who loves me, a comfy corner to sit in, fresh air, good music and good books, pen and paper to write with, something to think about, something to laugh over, and something good to eat. It doesn’t take much to make me happy. The trick is seeing it.