Finding Grateful

I feel a very unusual sensation — if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.

-Benjamin Disraeli

When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.

-Willie Nelson

According to some of my Facebook friends, November is an unofficial month of gratitude, where each day a participating person is supposed to name the blessings in his or her life.  I’ve been hunting around on the Internet for the origin of this and can’t find it, so if anyone can point me to the source or a link that explains it, please do!

On a related note, last night at the monthly parenting group I attend by Betsy Brown Braun, we talked about the upcoming holiday season and how to find less materialistic ways to give to our families and make the season more meaningful.  Betsy had a number of suggestions, including making one of the kids’ presents a gift certificate to give to a charity of their choice or to Heifer International or World Visions.  Other charities like Mazon or Feeding America or organizations like the local Meals on Wheels are good choices, but those that allow kids to help other kids can foster empathy and make the giving feel more personal.  The point of it all, when it came to our kids and the holidays, was to take the excessive focus off the material goods and sensory comforts that give us pleasure for fleeting moments as we consume them.  Because, Betsy told us, gratitude is enhanced by verbal expressions of thanks, as when she encouraged us to have our kids lead up to Thanksgiving by naming what they appreciate in their own lives.  And gratitude is enhanced by doing things for other people in need.

With that in mind, I’m trying to find my gratitude this year.  Don’t get me wrong.  There’s nothing wrong in my life that a few more hours of sleep each night and getting my 250-page manuscript out of my office won’t solve.  I’ve had an eventful, productive year.  None of my loved ones is deathly ill.  We know where our next meal is coming from, and we can make our mortgage payments.  I’m just tired, overworked, and sick of first- and second-draft writerly limbo.  I’m wrung out from caring too much about the recent presidential election and wish I had more help with my non-writerly responsibilities.  But I can’t help feeling like I’m missing the forest for the trees (I wish there was a non-cliched way to say that).  There have been times in my life, even in the recent years I was in mourning for my father, when I have felt buoyed by hope and gratitude at the holidays — if only the black comedic gratitude of knowing that my far-from-fun natal family has provided me with years of writing material.  So far, this is not one of those kinds of holiday seasons.

Having finished the first draft of my book, “The Rag and Bone Man,” this summer at VCCA was an incredible achievement.  Most of my frustration lies in now not having the unfettered time to finesse it well enough to send out to anyone else to read.  I won’t sport with your intelligence to enumerate the reasons I don’t have time to write.  But two of them are running and screaming with laughter through the house right now, since their school in on a series of “minimum days” for what seems like eternity during November.

So, with one week to go until Thanksgiving (and then the onslaught of Hanukah, Christmas, and New Years, with family visits and school vacations and the never-ending parade of office and school and family celebrations), I am trying to brace myself with a strong dose of authentic gratitude.  It’s always bittersweet because this is also the season, 12 years ago, when my father died.  His death, after decades of living in poverty with schizophrenia, was also what propelled me to write “The Rag and Bone Man.”  This morning before school the kids and I filled out a gift form for Meals on Wheels, and I plan to take Betsy up on some of her suggestions for family charity.  (I’d like to make it more of a family habit throughout the year, not just at the holidays.)

And as for the teeth-gnashing over the second draft of the manuscript?  Having just now written about the frustration, I already feel a little less ungrateful.