Looking for the Little Things
I've written before about how I've had a gratitude practice for a long time, nothing too elaborate, just three bullet points in my journal each night. I'm often grateful for some of life's little comforts over and over again, things like a good meal I didn't have to cook or an especially entertaining show on TV. A long time ago, I read The Miracle of Mindfulness by Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh in which he encourages a junior monk to peel an orange while savoring the moment, to do nothing but feel and smell and taste the orange. When I have the presence of mind to do such things, I like to savor moments of small joy while they are happening and then to reflect on them afterwords. I'm not above escaping from my present reality at times and looking forward to something that's happening soon.
I like my job, but I relish the weekend intensely. My Saturday mornings are blissful lately. Wonder Woman is deep into training for a couple of ultramarathons and on Saturday's she normally plans a long run of 20 miles or more. I always get up with her, even if it's 4:00 or 4:30. I'll have a cup of coffee beside her on the couch, get in a quick kiss before she's out the door and then I'm alone with time to write, drink more coffee and maybe nod off for the odd pre-dawn nap of which I'm fond. I'm always back awake by 7:00 because that's when Zorba's, the neighborhood diner, opens and I'm off the two blocks up the street for "the usual."
In a week I'm traveling to Austin to spend a weekend with my son. That's a big thing. I don't travel like that often. A little thing is the text I got from him the other night after the emotional moment at the DNC featuring Tim Walz's son. My boy (actually a 41-year-old man) just wanted me to know her related to the kid and his feelings for his old man. Nowhere on earth can you buy the kind of feelings that getting a message like that brings on. Sitting in a too small for me airplane seat and dragging a suitcase over three airports in as many states is 100% worth it to spend time with one of my favorite people.
My home life might bore more adventurous people. Wonder Woman and I are very fond of our routine and seldom vary from it. We eat dinner as soon as we get home from the university where we both work. it's never elaborate because we value having the extra time each night that a simple dinner allows. Often but not every night we will watch an hour of TV, but a lot of evenings we just sit together, me typing away and her amusing herself with whatever is interesting on her iPad. Some nights she might find 20 videos to show me, and I will stop what I'm doing to watch every one of them. We sit close together, within touching distance and I find it comforting just to reach over and rub her foot every now and then.
One of my favorite things to do each day is to look through old pictures. I've got them saved everywhere and it only takes a minute to bring them up. I look forward to Thursdays because that's the day I look through the oldest photos I have, looking for something suitable to share for #ThrowbackThursday. We have five kids and thirteen grandchildren and there are plenty of pictures to go through of all of them, plus a marriage's worth of joint adventures.
Lately I've been listening to music a lot more than I have in years. I have thousands and thousands of songs collected over the years, much of which I obsessively curated and rated, making countless playlists that have gone unheard for over a decade. Now, each day I ride to work and back to the sound of the old alt-country bands I enjoy: Uncle Tupelo, the Drive by Truckers, The Bottle Rockets and old Ryan Adams songs. Wonder Woman rolls her eyes and lets me listen because she loves me.
My life is full of these little moments, and I do my best to savor them. I love waking up early in the morning to see what my European friends on social media are up to. Spending the last half hour of each day browsing the RSS feed of a group of familiar bloggers is sublime. I'm hoping that one of my favorite bloggers gets a job from any interview she had this week. I'm celebrating that a grown ass man an ocean away just got his driver's license. I am tickled that a developer sent me a trial copy of a new app to review. Someone on Reddit called me by my given name instead of my username this week because he'd taken the time to learn it in order to give me kudos for providing some helpful information.
There is joy everywhere, little droplets of joy hiding in plain sight in acts of kindness or just moments when I can escape self-centered monotony and be consumed by curiosity or humor or compassion or wonder. The first step is realizing that and getting out of the way to let it happen.
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