An Attitude of Gratitude

This school year I have begun a new practice with my younger children. We're consciously, intentionally practicing the art of gratitude, of thanksgiving.

After we have said our prayers, we each say at least one thing that we are grateful for in our lives so that we may not forget, among the disturbances of the coming day, that we still have reasons to be grateful. It makes us think. And it makes it harder to look at life and feel that everything is going all wrong. After all, it can't be going all wrong if we said just two hours ago that there were some very good things about our lives. I truly am hoping that over time we will all experience the increased inability to complain about things.


So I'll share with you one thing I am grateful for about this day.

It was a lovely, dark, September morning when I stepped out to go to my coffee-date-with-a-computer. As it wasn't raining, I peeled back the lid of the car—we are blessed to have a sun/moon roof—and opened the front windows on both sides of the car.

The temperature and humidity were perfect, at least to me, and I had the dark, still morning all to myself. Well, maybe I shared it with an occasional jogger or quietly moving car, fellow enjoyers of the morning. But we all kept respectfully to ourselves. The only breaking of what would otherwise have been pure silence was the singing of crickets.

Somehow it is easy to think of music as a uniquely human construct or idea, and to some extent, it is. But every now and then I have to rejigger my thinking and contemplate the sounds of nature as the only true music, divine music. It is beautiful. It is easiest to hear this music in the very early morning when the world of man has not yet joined the symphony. It is at its purest then.

Even the sound of machinery can have a certain beauty to it. Mostly not, but having lived in a city when I was a child, I do find a certain comfort in the sound of cars passing in the earlier part of the evening, when I am falling asleep. There is comfort in the knowledge of not being alone in the world, of there being other people with places to go, families to see. At least, that's the way it seemed to me as a child. So now the gentle hum of a car on the road at 9:00 or 10:00 at night is something like a lullaby.

In winter there are no early birds out singing. There are no crickets, no frogs or other animals making their warm weather sounds. There is just a cold silence. Perhaps there is the wind. Sometimes there is the sound of wind chimes that a neighbor leaves out throughout the year. But mostly there is the chilly quiet that provides such a perfect background for the silvery tree branches that reach rigidly up to the sky.

The most silent of all are the mornings that are snow-covered, when there is little movement from anyone or anything. School is out, and workers who have to go to work must first dig their cars out of the snow that piled up during the night. The snow is insulation. It is a sound barrier, a muffler. The world has slowed its tempo for just a little while, and a certain peace descends. People seem happier, calmer. Slow is good every now and then. It helps us to remember.

I'm quite happy with the peaceful ambience of winter just now, so the music of fluffy white clouds in a blue summer sky will have to wait for a while.

And for this moment I am grateful.