I certainly didn't intend to begin my contributions to this blog on gratitude by quoting from books, but just today I encountered another passage apropos to this topic, and can't resist sharing it. Again, its David Brooks, and this time he quotes from the diary of a Dutch woman, Etty Hillesum, born at the brink of the first World War. On the cusp of that war's terrible successor, Hillesum, never before a religious practitioner, finds herself falling into a life of prayer. Prayer, she finds, is a way for her to make peace with her vulnerabilty and an intimate opportunity to practice gratitude. Before she knows it, a desire to practice prayer for these reasons becomes a compulsion that may come over her in an moment. Gratitude, she finds, is transformational.
No longer [do] I want this or that, but: Life is great and good and fascinating and eternal, and if you dwell so much on yourself and flounder and fluff about, you miss the mighty eternal current that is life. It is in these moments--and I am so grateful for them-- that all personal ambition drops away from me, and that my thirst for knowledge and understanding comes to rest, and a small piece of eternity descends on me with a sweeping wingbeat.
I am so grateful for Hillesum's words this morning, as I feel like they are speaking directly to me. I too feel distant from a religious practice that would provide me with the call and the structure to practice daily gratitude. I too am far too often carried away for hours, days, weeks by "my thirst for knowledge and understanding;" I too "flounder and fluff about." My wife, a proud intravert, recently told me that I live my interior life more intensely than anyone she's ever known, herself included-- and I don't even consider myself full-fledged intravert. All that said, I have been fortunate enough, as I was earlier this morning, to experience Hillesum's "small piece of eternity" when I give it space to do so. I come away from that experience like someone whose first bite of food after a long fast punctuates their hunger. Sounds dramatic, I know, but that is what it felt like.
I am grateful for convenient ways to quickly be surrounded by the "good and fascinating and eternal," as I had this morning walking the MKT trail here in Columbia, an early rails-to-trails conversion success story. The trail was championed by former Columbia Mayor Darwin Hindman, who passed away just last week, and whose efforts, along with others, made possible a true jewel of a natural, public resource. As I walked one of the many portions of the trail that runs straight and seemingly endlessly through a tree-lined, arched canopy, filtering the sun's light through it like an arboreal Sainte Chapelle, I felt that urge that Hillesum describes. For her, the body's folds and articulations reveal how it is "made for prayer", and I found myself thinking about how often I assume that the most beautiful places in the world are far away and rarely, if ever, achievable.
So I'm grateful for today's insight: that gratitude's pull is so powerful, that the opportunities it presents are so omnipresent when one takes even a moment to look for them, and that its powers, like life's "mighty eternal current," are so transformational when indulged, that it need only capture you once, on a trail walk in summer's early days, to remind you of how much it belongs in your life.
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