Grateful Saturday

I woke up dazed and irritable this morning. I'd dreamed about my old job at the law school and about my boss from back then who behaved towards me with a distressing combination of clinginess and coldness. I sat on the edge of the bed for a few minutes trying to bring myself back into my life as it is now. But I didn't succeed. My stomach growled strangely as it used to with anguish before I had to go to work, my vision was blurred, making coffee seemed a Sisyphean task, and I wanted to have a big bucket of greasy fries for breakfast.

I haven't recovered several hours later, despite a hot cup of lemon tea and reading the new issue of Glimmer Train, so I must stop, I must stop and take stock of what's happening, I must give myself a time-out and the punishment of writing down all the things in my life that I should be grateful for, the many, many reasons why my indulging in this self-pitying, angry mood is simply stupid. So here goes my list of good things that I forget almost every day to be grateful for. It is so hard to begin.

1) Physical health. Limbs and fingers and toes, lungs that breathe and heart that beats, eyes that see and ears that hear, a brain with all the right chemicals in the right balance.

2) Bookshelves stuffed with books, and bookstores and libraries. Pen and paper. A computer. A little space in this great web of images and voices to say whatever I want without fear. This enormous luxury of understanding words, of being able to read them and write them, of being able to learn new ones in any language I want to.

3) Parents who are alive and healthy and with whom I get along. A sister who surprises me with her courage and intelligence. A good, good life partner, with whom the question of love is a simplistic, irrelevant one, because what we're building goes further, much further than that.

4) The hundreds of mornings I've spent in solitude and silence working on the one thing that matters most to me. And learning (from In The Actors Studio guest Dustin Hoffman) that failure is not the worst thing that can happen to you; that the worst that can happen is committing the sin of settling for what's safe and comfortable, never taking a risk, never pushing yourself into that terrifying place where truths are discovered. Mary Oliver: "All my life/I have been restless/I have felt there is something/more wonderful than gloss/than wholeness/than staying at home."