TO FEEL GRATEFUL
So there I was practicing gratefulness, and on good days, no problem. “Oh thank you for this lovely sky. And my dear family. And thank you for my loving husband, John.”
Then, when the dark days came, I would struggle to feel gratitude but find it forced and phony. I’d be praying, “Thank you, God, I’m really grateful for this lesson . . . or challenge . . . or, um, chance to grow . . .”—but I wasn’t. What I wanted to say was “Help! Make things better! This is so not okay!”
Then I found a little book by Richard Carlson: Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff . . . and It’s All Small Stuff. He wrote that the happiest people he knew were hardly happy all the time. That’s encouraging. In fact, they could really get down. All right! The key seemed to be their awareness that bad times and bad moods will come. So rather than fight them, they just accept them and wait for them to pass—yeah, but bad times can get worse and drag on and—and they pass a lot quicker, Carlson added, if you accept them with grace.
Ah, now I got it. It was like finding the missing piece of a puzzle. Good day, be grateful. Bad day, be graceful. Be grateful, be graceful, and on it goes.
SLOW
As time seems to move ever faster—and quantum physics suggests that it is—we’re moving faster too and multitasking to keep up. But one July day in our warmest summer, the house was so hot I could barely move, and it was a challenge just to focus on one task. So I slowly emptied the dishwasher. Then I slowly cut flowers outside and arranged them in vases indoors. And when my mother called that evening, I listened to her without simultaneously checking my email.
What I realized was this: When I slow down, I feel truly connected with the task or object or person at hand.
Connected with the peacock-patterned dishes from Czechoslovakia that I took out of the dishwasher and put away while remembering my nana who had passed them down. Connected with the orange, pink, and coral zinnias I’d arranged while noticing how each color set off the other in a soft yet vibrant way. Connected to my mother, to what she was saying and the feelings beneath.
Once again I was reminded that connection is the path to sacred living, and doing one thing at a time—slowly—is one way there.
THE SOUNDS OF MUSIC
In my twenties, when I vowed to live intensely and experience everything, I spent most of my weekends at the movies. On Saturdays, there were double features, and I once sat through three films by Jean-Luc Godard (or maybe I just saw Breathless three times).
What gave movies an edge over life? The soundtrack. I imagined how much better life would be if it only had a soundtrack. Even the hard parts could be softened with a few violins.
The universe was clearly attuned to my thoughts, for some years later the iPod was born. Till then, we settled for stereo. I remember when stereo first came out and a friend taught me how to find the best spot in the room to get its full effect. If I needed more proof of the magic of music, that was it—there was one spot where it all came together just right.
Music is like prayer: I forget how powerful it is and how quickly it can lift me. The highest I ever went was in Venice, Italy, with John. In a small, golden-lit chapel, a group of inspired musicians played Vivaldi concertos as we sat and listened in awe. Or maybe it was walking into a rock concert in Rye, New York, just as Janis Joplin was belting out “Piece of My Heart”—with such power and passion I can still hear it.
Another gift of music is its synergy: It can make anything feel more sacred and fun—cooking, eating, or making love. And while it often brings me into the moment, it can also pull me back to the past. Listening to “oldies but goodies” or folk songs from the ’60s, I relive first love: the pleasure and pain, marriage and babies, dreams and loss . . . and I get to see the movie that’s the movie of my life.
So of course I bought an iPod.
My kids were impressed, knowing my discomfort with anything high-tech. They were less impressed when I kept it in its box for two years, along with the digital camera and other gadgets I seem unable to comprehend. Then Joe, our sonin-law, came to visit, connected the iPod to my computer, and taught me how to upload and download.
The weekend Joe left, I sat in my office and filled the iPod with every CD we owned: Sly and the Family Stone, Bach’s Brandenburg concertos, West African drumming, the Beatles. Soon I was rocking in my chair to Paul Simon singing “Graceland.” I grew misty hearing Andrea Bocelli’s Romanza. And when the theme from Evita came on—“Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”—I was crying too.
Higher and higher I went as I played Mozart . . . Dylan . . . John Denver . . . Aretha . . . and Mexican music that made me get up and dance. Ray Charles was next, singing the blues, and stamp-your-feet gospel took me straight to God, I swear it.
I spent that whole day alone in my office, uploading, downloading, crying, and dancing. And when I went downstairs to make a pie, I turned up the speakers in the kitchen and living room, plugged in the iPod, and clicked on a medley Paul H. had made for us: Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and, as a bonus, Louis Armstrong. Louis was singing “What a Wonderful World.” It felt as achingly sweet as love.
When John came home, he heard the music from upstairs, downstairs, and all around us and said, “You’ve got music everywhere.”
Which is what I always wanted, a soundtrack for my life.
Music washes away from the soul
the dust of everyday life.
—NED ROREM
FORTUNE COOKIE
