Thankful For Small Miracles

We're always grateful for the big things:  our families, our friends, our dwelling, our food.  These are the "givens" for which we bow our heads and give thanks at the holiday table.

In this season of unease and reprioritizing, I find myself increasingly more aware of my smaller gifts.  Not that I don't want to think exalted thoughts; it's just that it's hard to concentrate with so much undermining my peace of mind.  It used to be that I was distracted because the car repair cost $243 more than the estimate, the dog's shots were a month overdue and two bills got left out of the weekly payment lottery.

Now I worry about anthrax in the Christmas cards, losing half our retirement money in the stock market and whether we can afford to keep the house.  In the past, I overcame my fears by promising myself, "I'll think about it tomorrow."  I knew I was being self-delusional, but it didn't matter.  It was how I kept going.

Now that's impossible.  The drumbeat of bad news is everywhere; the only way to escape it is to cut ourselves off from the world, and we can't do that.  Searching for some peace of mind, I came across a quote by Albert Einstein that's now taped to my bathroom mirror:

"There are only two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other is as though everything is a miracle."

Seems to me there's no choice here.  None of us wants to be permanently weighed down by inexorable sadness, so I've begun making a list of my small miracles.

Every morning I wake up to a Chinese thrush singing like a coloratura soprano right outside my window.  An owl sometimes circles over my head at dusk.  As I'm driving to town John Lennon's "Imagine" comes on the car radio.  I get an e-mail from a long-ago student who writes, "I'm a lawyer now, and I just wanted to thank you for helping me become one."  A baby ahead of me in the grocery store checkout line reaches over her mother's should and touches my cheek, her tiny fingers are as delicate as feathers.  

These moments inspire me.  I spontaneously invite neighbors for Wednesday night pizza and don't care how clean the house is.  I double the amount of money I'd normally enclose in a sympathy note.  I impulsively buy a phone card for a friend's child who's a freshman at a faraway college.  Instead of absentmindedly patting our ancient cat as I pass by, I sit down on the back steps and cradle him in my arms.  His arthritic body is light as air, but his purr is stronger than ever.  Mentally reviewing all we've been through together, I count his unwavering devotion as one of my greatest gifts.

These daily miracles tether me.  There's laundry to be done, a column to write, a birthday present to wrap, and what about dinner?  It's from the reality of our lives that we draw our strength to live.  This holiday season I will try and pay greater attention to what's actually happening, instead of what might happen, and remember that it's the purring cat, the singing bird and the striving student who make me smile, put a spring in my step, get me from 10:15 a.m. to 10:22 a.m.  I know terrible things continue to happen to people elsewhere, but today they aren't happening to me.  For this, I am thankful.

© 2001 The Women Syndicate

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