The Anti-Murphy's Law: When things can go wrong, but don't

Bad luck calls attention to itself. Good luck can be easier to overlook. We just take it for granted when things go well. But we grumble all too easily when things go badly.

So I make it a practice to try to look on the bright side of what seems like bad luck. I try to acknowledge examples of the anti-Murphy’s Law: sometimes, lots of things could go wrong, but don’t.

Yesterday, for example, I had to admit that my flat tire occurred under the best circumstances possible. Doesn't it seem like car trouble always happens when you're running behind schedule, heading to somewhere you urgently need to be, and it's dark or freezing cold or raining or ninety degrees in the shade, and there's no one available to help?

Not yesterday, and that was what I kept reminding myself as I waited for hours in the tire repair shop. My flat tire happened just after noon as I was heading to the office for an afternoon shift that could go on just as efficiently without me. It was about 55 degrees out and sunny, and my husband was working from home for the day. I had a jacket and sensible shoes on; I didn't need to go to the bathroom, and I had neither children nor dog in the car with me.

Car trouble doesn't get much better than that.

I tried to keep this in mind as I waited impatiently for my husband to meet me on the highway shoulder, and as I waited impatiently for him to put on the spare tire, and as I waited some more at the tire shop for the original tire to be replaced. By all rights, this should have been much worse, I reminded myself. Truly, the biggest thing I could complain about was that I had packed myself a delicious lunch to eat in the office and it was sitting in my car in the service bay, so as I sat in the comfortably appointed waiting area, I was growing increasingly hungry.

But even that seemed trivial. So many factors could have made the situation so much worse. Just a day earlier, having attended a late-afternoon wake for a friend's father, I'd been driving through the dark streets of an unfamiliar city. And then I met Rick and the kids for dinner, and Rick left early in his own car and I let Tim drive home so that he could get some nighttime highway practice. We could have had our flat tire after dark, with Tim at the wheel.

Or it could have been cold or hot or rainy, or Rick could have been out of town, or I could have been driving to the airport to catch a flight. I could have been in a tunnel, on a bridge, in a construction zone.

But none of these was the case. It was midafternoon on a warm sunny autumn day when I heard the rackety-rack sound characteristic of a flat tire. I pulled onto an extra-wide shoulder on a stretch of highway fifteen minutes from home and waited for Rick to bail me out.

And bail me out he did. Sure, I should know how to change my own tire. But I don't. Roadside assistance is good; a willing husband is better. And yesterday, with all the circumstances in my favor, was the best of all. Bad luck happens. But this was about as good as bad luck gets.

The up-side to housework (and laundry, and cooking, and errands....)

Whenever Rick or I complains about work, the other one says “Yeah, that’s the down side of having a job. The work.”

I was thinking about that this past weekend as I tried not to feel overwhelmed with household tasks. I’d had an especially busy work week – normally I’m at home mornings and on site with a client in the afternoons, but for the past week I’d been working on a project that had me leaving the house first thing in the morning and gone for eight or ten hours every day – and had that busy-mom feeling of the house falling down around me.

But then I reminded myself: No, the house is not falling down around you. It could use some vacuuming. It could use some dusting. Emptying the wastebaskets wouldn’t be a bad idea, and everyone would benefit from a load or two of clean laundry. But the house isn’t falling down.

And that brought me back to thinking about what Rick and I say about work. The down side of having a house is the housework, but conversely, the up side of housework is that it means you have a house. I thought about various people we know in Colorado, none of whom have lost their own homes but several of whom have seen their neighbors lose theirs, and some of the people we know can’t access their homes reliably even if their houses are still standing, so they have to temporarily move out. If your house washed away in a flood, I reminded myself, you wouldn’t have housework. Better to have the house….and the housework.

And then the same message seemed so easy to extrapolate to other things. Yes, there’s cooking to do… because we have access to healthy appealing ingredients with which we can make all kinds of things. And yes, I have a long list of errands….but I wouldn’t have any errands if I had no money to spend on things we needed.

This wasn’t just trite Pollyanna-isms. Thinking about the Colorado flood victims reminded me of what it’s like every winter when at some point we lose power for a day or two, or more: how all I want to do once the electricity has been off for a couple of days is wash dishes, even though washing dishes is never a high priority when the house is running smoothly.

Just as Rick and I say with work, the down side of having a materially comfortable life is having to take care of all those material goods. It’s reassuring to have a home, and food, and cars, and clothes. Taking decent care of them doesn’t seem like such a chore when I hold on to the perspective that these material blessings require a certain amount of maintenance. Pollyanna-ish or not, in that light, a Saturday filled with housekeeping, cooking and errands feels more like a blessing than a hassle.

"To Do" versus "Did"

It’s another one of those days when I have to remind myself to shift my attention to the “Did” list rather than the “To Do” list, and acknowledge that what I did do deserves recognition just as much as what I didn’t do.

That can be hard to put into practice, though. The “To Do” list is such an attention grabber, with its bold headings and flashy colors – at least the ones my imagination superimposes over the items on it. The To Do list jumps up and down and waves its arms in the air. It does cartwheels and performs cheers. It elbows its way to the front of my consciousness.

Meanwhile, the “Did” list sits quietly in a lounge chair with its feet up, laconically watching the To Do list fuss and clamor.

And so the Did list gets ignored while the squeaky wheel of the To Do list gets all of my mental grease. I run through the litany over and over again of what I need to do, what I did not get to this weekend, what’s due in the upcoming week. I vacuumed yesterday, but only half the house (and the easy half, at that). I need to finish working on my Fourth of July article. There are three baskets of clean laundry waiting to be folded. The car needs an oil change this week too, and I should write an email to the mom in charge of the kids’ beach trip for Wednesday.

But, as I remind myself, one is always making choices about how to spend time. As I was ignoring all of the things on my To Do list, I wasn’t doing absolutely nothing. I was spending a Sunday morning with my sister and her 7-year-old, who were visiting from Washington, D.C. I watched my young nephew row around my parents’ backyard pond in a rowboat, and then I watched the same busy child make up obstacle courses at the playground while my sister and I ruminated on the derivations and deviations of friendship.

True, these weren’t on any To Do list. But the vacuuming will still be there tomorrow and so will the work deadlines. My sister and my nephew, on the other hand, flew back to Washington yesterday. By the time they next visit, my nephew may have outgrown his interest in both rowboats and playgrounds. It truly might have been my last opportunity to see him do these things.

So the To Do list outweighs the Did list in flashiness and magnitude as always, but the Did list basks in a sense of gratitude and satisfaction. What I did mattered to me, even if not to my career development or my domestic upkeep. The To Do list will stick around another day; the Did list will fade into memory. Nonetheless, I’m so glad for what I did.

All is well (even if that's not compelling prose)

I’m afraid that as an essayist and blogger, I might find contentment to be my downfall.

It’s true of my journals, also. I set myself a minimum word count of 1,000 words per day, and there’s an undeniable inverse correlation between my level of immediate happiness on any given day and the number of words I’m able to churn out. When people are annoying me, circumstances are frustrating me, fate is confounding me, or opportunity seems not to be availing itself to me, I have plenty to say. I can write for hours on days like that. The worse mood I’m in, the more I have to say in my journal. One thousand words is nothing when I’ve descended into what cartoonist Pat Brady calls “the dungeon of resentment.”

But somehow my fingers run a little less fast and loose on the keyboard when things are looking up.

It’s not particularly logical. It seems as if there should be just as much to say about life’s more positive times as its lesser moments. I should be able to enthuse for page upon page about how great it all is. I certainly could back in high school and college, when a good day with friends or an auspicious first date could fill up my one-thousand word quota almost before I reached the end of my opening paragraph.

It’s different now, though. I sit down to attempt a new essay or newspaper column or blog entry and find myself feeling strangely devoid of commentary. “All is well,” I think to myself. “The kids are happy and healthy. We have housing and gainful employment. As far as I know, no one plans to serve us with a subpoena this month. What’s to talk about?”

Well, there’s always the option of commenting on how good it all is. But after one beta reader of my running/parenting memoir scribbled in the margins, “Enough with the gratitude!”, I’ve been a little wary of that theme. Gratitude, I’ve come to suspect, is a fine emotion with which to govern one’s soul but not such a fruitful one when it comes to incisive prose.

And no, I have definitely never reached the point of desperation at which I’d trade happiness and contentment for more writing material. Not in the least. I still suspect I once lost a job due to contentment – my overall happiness with my workload and the company in general made me too unambitious for that hard-driving, fast-innovating corporate environment – but not having enough difficult material at this particular time of my life to fill out a few essays is not, at heart, a complaint.

Life is good. It doesn’t make for compelling narrative, which is one reason that I devote the bulk of my revenue-producing writing to features about other people – I can’t rely on my own circumstances for enough hard-hitting material these days – but I’ll take it. No complaints here when everyone in my close circles appears to be happy, healthy and emotionally well-balanced. Circumstances will change; fate will throw its inevitable curve balls; and I’ll find myself writing page upon page to exorcise my darker emotions once again. But at the moment, writer’s block is a welcome, if paradoxical, sign that there’s just nothing wrong. All is well, and even if those are the only three words I can find to write on any given day, they’re good enough.

An ordinary Sunday

Just an ordinary Sunday.

After breakfast, I ran three miles. Not a particularly impressive distance, but it was 14 degrees out as I headed out the door. Three miles was all I could brace myself to do, and it was enough. Day 1646 of my running streak.

At church, I was prepared to teach Sunday school, but none of my students showed up, which is not unusual during ski season. So instead, I was able to attend the sermon given by our impressive student minister.

After church I stopped by my parents’ house. Mom gave me a batch of brownies to take home, and I showed her how to transfer an audiobook onto her iPod so she could listen to it in the car.

Back home, the kids had just finished unloading the dishwasher. True, I had left a note before I went to church specifically asking them to do that, so I wasn’t surprised, but it was still nice to return home to a partially cleaned-up kitchen.

My friends Jane and Donna came over to join me for a walk in the woods. We bundled up against the cold – typical for February, but not typical for this particular winter – and headed out planning to walk for an hour, but we were having such a good time being out in the woods and talking about a variety of issues that we stayed out for an hour and twenty minutes. Then we came home and ate the chocolate cookies that Tim had asked me to make earlier in the weekend.

Later in the afternoon I read the paper for a while and mixed up a batch of vegetarian chili for weekday lunches before heating up dinner: leftover pizza contributed by my parents, who had stopped by a new pizza parlor late last week. Over dinner, the four of us joked about Valentine’s Day ideas and made plans for Rick’s upcoming birthday. Tim and Holly played a video game together before bath time.

It wasn’t a holiday or a travel day or a day when we did anything very unusual. It was an ordinary day. And yet absolutely wonderful in its ordinariness. The life I live now is the life I dreamed of living when I was in my twenties and thirties: happy, well-adjusted kids and husband, comfortable inviting house, good friends, welcoming community, parents nearby. Getting paid for writing articles and essays. Being able to head out the back door for a walk in the woods any time I want to is the icing on the cake.

These are the kinds of weekend days the kids will remember, I think to myself as the day ends. Yes, they’ll remember vacations and special occasions, but also the days when we mostly just hang around enjoying each other’s company. Pizza for dinner; a video game or two; nothing spectacular. An ordinary day. I look back at my own childhood and remember similar days: listening to records, playing with the dog, maybe a board game or a ping-pong match with my sisters. Regular daily life.

But such a happy reality, then and now. Sure, special events make for great memories, and those are the ones that end up in the photo album: family trips, birthday parties, class plays, enormous snowmen, sand castles, baseball championships. We didn’t take any pictures yesterday; it didn’t occur to us that any of it was worth photographing, and we were probably right.

Perfectly ordinary days are difficult to capture in images: what would the composition of the photo actually consist of? Fortunately, the requirements for good memories aren’t quite so stringent.

The coffee grinder, rising like a phoenix...

Ironically, the very same week I conceded that my frequent and open expressions of gratitude are apparently annoying to some people, the coffee grinder fixed itself.

And if there was ever a time that I simply cannot repress my feelings of gratitude, this may be it.

A coffee grinder isn’t all that important, of course. And yet having it break seems like an inconvenience far out of proportion to the appliance itself, especially at 6:45 on a Tuesday morning. I had no ground coffee in the house, only whole beans. So without the grinder, there was no way to make coffee.

This development wasn’t completely unexpected. The grinder is almost ten years old, which is geriatric for an inexpensive electric kitchen appliance. And recently I’d noticed that it had been making sort of an irregular chucking noise when it was running. And I’m sure the fact that the particular kind of coffee I favor has a very high oil content doesn’t help when it comes to machine maintenance.

So I was disappointed but not shocked when it stopped working altogether on Tuesday morning. I took it apart and cleaned out each piece and reassembled it, but still, only a dry whirring sound rather than the reassuring roar of a successful coffee-grinding operation came out.

But the next morning, just on what felt like the most futile kind of whim, I turned the dial just one notch to the right, and it roared to life.

I have no idea why. I guess maybe it just needed a little vacation. This was a small thing, but there was something so satisfying about it because it left no room for ambiguity. The coffee grinder was working again, and I could have a fresh cup of coffee, and there were no further contingencies to address.

Meanwhile, other good things happened this week too. A family member who was expecting bad news on the medical front instead received news that was conditionally optimistic. The acute soreness left from my gum graft surgery last week began to subside. I finished my first small project for a new client and both of us were happy with the results.

The coffee grinder was probably the most trivial item on my entire list of problems earlier this week, and so my sense of delight when it inexplicably came back to life was probably somewhat out of proportion. But it was just so easily solved that I couldn’t help being pleased. Fresh coffee: a minor concern compared to health, pain relief or many other issues. But a fine reward nonetheless. And so once again I can’t refrain from expressing, yes, gratitude.

When gratitude hurts (other people)

“The reason I don’t like looking at Facebook is that everyone is just bragging about how happy they are!”

The sentiment came from an acquaintance during an informal group discussion about social media recently. Although I don’t know the woman who said it well, I do know that she has faced some very difficult obstacles in her life recently. But it surprised me nonetheless. I had never thought about expressing happiness as a form of bragging. I just think of it as, well, honesty. And an outward display of gratitude. And almost everyone agrees that gratitude is a good thing, don’t they? In Thornton Wilder's words, “We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”

And yet I’m sympathetic to this acquaintance, who has endured with courage particular problems that are very alien to me. I don’t even think she and I are connected on Facebook, but her words gave me pause and made me think about whether there are times when it is insensitive to express gratitude.

Yesterday I thought of her as I sat down at my computer to dash off a quick update. Yesterday was the kind of day that was wonderful for its very ordinariness. I barely left home, except to teach Sunday school in the morning. Sunday school is far, far from being one of my favorite things to do, but it’s a little like the Vaudeville joke about why the man is hitting himself with a pipe: it feels so good when I stop, and after a successful class – which I define as one in which all the kids stayed attentive and contributed to the discussion – I feel great about the time I put into preparing for it. Better still, I had fit in a run before church, so I didn’t have to go through the morning with the thought of fitting in a run hanging over my head. After church I bought some fresh fruit, went home and made everyone lunch, and read the paper for a while. Then I put together a pot of vegetarian chili and let it simmer while two friends and I went walking in the woods for an hour, and after that I made chocolate chip cookies and spent the evening with my family.

But is it bragging for me to admit that? Or is it expressing gratitude? Of course, the fact that one person said she doesn’t like hearing about how happy other people are doesn’t make it uniformly wrong, but her opinion means something to me. I’m well aware of how many people face challenges that I don’t, or for whatever reason have not found themselves in the same fortunate circumstances I have. Is my being happy anathema to their sense of well-being?

I don’t know the answer. As I said at the outset, I was surprised that she said she didn’t like to read about other people’s happiness. I don’t think any the worse of my friend for her honesty. And even knowing that one person might be made to feel worse than necessary for my posts initially made me hold back from writing about yesterday’s pleasures.

But actually, I don’t think my expressions of gratitude are necessarily what she was talking about anyway. I wasn’t bragging about my children’s successes or my vacation plans. I was just taking pleasure in an ordinary day. And my guess is that she would understand that – the gratitude itself, and the good intent behind it.

Busy Sunday

At 7:56 last night, I sat down and glanced at the clock.

7:56. I was sitting down for just a moment, but at that moment I felt like it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to avoid getting up again all evening.

But then Holly called from the shower that she needed a towel, and the dog looked like a trip outside for her might not be a bad idea, and I remembered that the clothes needed to be moved from washing machine to dryer.

It was a busy day. I arose early to write my usual one thousand words of Morning Pages. I decoded the problem I was having syncing my Google calendar with my new phone. And though the peace and quiet of the household with everyone else still asleep was blissful, I headed out for a four-mile run.

“Tell me one thing: why do we have to exercise?” a man who looked to be in his sixties and was out for a walk near the state park called out to me as I approached him.

“Funny you should ask; we were talking about that just this weekend,” I told him, which was true. “It’s because we don’t do manual labor! If we were out working in the fields all day, we wouldn’t go running!”

I finished my run and made waffles for the kids’ breakfast. Then I cleaned up the kitchen and took a shower and headed to my friend Jane’s house. She and another friend and I did a 45-minute walk in the warm midday sunlight and talked about how odd it was to have a sixty-degree November day just two weeks after an October snowstorm.

I drove back home and put in a load of laundry and swept the floors. I welcomed a new friend of Holly’s who came over to play. I figured out what to make for the next several dinners and made up a grocery list. Then it was time to go grocery shopping.

Home from the supermarket, I tried to unload groceries, talk on the phone to my mother, and make dinner all at the same time. It took a while, but I succeeded, more or less. I made meatloaf and baked potatoes stuffed with a steamed broccoli mixture, and it was one of those rare evenings when everyone not only sat down together (that’s not the rare part) but ate what was offered.

It wasn’t an unusually strenuous day. As I told the man who was out for a walk while I was running, it’s not like we were working in the fields. Or performing surgery. Or piloting a steamship or keeping a spaceship in orbit. It was just regular weekend life.

And it’s wonderful. I love all of these things: running by myself, walks with friends, cooking, taking care of the house, being with my family.

Still, I felt decadent submitting to inertia at 7:56 while Holly took a shower. But I couldn’t help it. The days are full. Still, every aspect of it had meant something to me. Fellowship. Parenthood. Nourishment. Physical well-being.

Days like this seem mundane sometimes. They aren’t the ones we remember, the way we remember vacation days or parties, say. They are just….days full of weekend-day type things.

But I wouldn’t have taken away a single part of it. Even if by 7:56 I was ready to give up on all mobility for the rest of the evening.

Yes, I was worn out, although I managed to rally enough to do what else needed to be done before bed: tucking in Holly, letting the dog out again, locking the front door. Despite not having been toiling at any kind of manual labor, I went to sleep with that invaluable sense of having done a good day’s work. Even if I have no material harvest to show for it.

Horseflies, or the lack thereof

Only in the past year or so have I picked up the habit of wearing a hat when I run, and this is mostly due to increased conscientiousness about sun protection.

Yesterday morning, though, I headed out without my hat, noticing only about three minutes into the run that something felt different. “Oh well,” I rationalized when I realized what was missing. “It's still so early” – it was just a little after 7 a.m. – “I'll be running mostly in the shade anyway.”

But then as I looked at my dog just ahead of me at the end of the leash, I remembered the other reason a hat has been useful these past few months: because of the prevalence of horseflies. If I wear a hat, they leave me alone, but I still see them clustered around the poor dog's ears and clinging insistently to her haunches.

At least that's typically the case. But it wasn't yesterday. No horseflies pestered my hatless head, and I saw no horseflies near the dog at all. When I thought about it, I realized I hadn't seen any all week.

And so I knew I had to add horseflies to the long list of negative factors that I notice only when they're present and then forget all about in their absence.

For me, the most obvious example of this occurs during power outages, and coincidentally, we had one just two days ago: the first since the winter, when we had an outage that lasted about six hours. If you ask me while the electricity was on whether I could go an hour or two without it, I'd say of course I could: quite happily, in fact. And yet within minutes of the start of an outage, it seems I think of a dozen things I urgently want to do that require electricity (or running water, which because we have wells rather than a public supply is also unavailable when there's no electricity, or Internet access). When the power went out earlier this week, I shrugged it off at first: the weather was pleasant, and we were using neither heat nor air conditioning; and unlike the more typical power outages that occur midwinter during snowstorms and ice storms, we still had hours left of daylight. I was even mostly done with my writing for the day. So it didn't seem like a big deal.

Except that I soon realized I wanted to wash the lunch dishes, and run some laundry, and use the vacuum cleaner, and look up a few items on line regarding our upcoming vacation, and send my editor an email, and...and all kinds of things I couldn't do without electricity. I never really appreciate all it does for me until it goes out; conversely, when the electricity is on, as it is now, I never stop to think what a pain it is to lose power.

Sore throats are another one. Every time I get a sore throat, I wonder why I haven't been spending more time feeling grateful for the lack of pain in my throat. Car trouble, too: whenever everything is running smoothly in the automotive sphere, I forget what an imposition it is to deal with car problems.

Looking at the dog as we ran yesterday, I reminded myself to take note of the lack of horseflies around her and also around me. It's hard to remember to be grateful for everything bad we don't have at any given time, whether it's horseflies or power outages or far more serious problems. Yesterday, while running, I remembered for a few moments, and felt more grateful than usual.

Wonderful weekend

We had a wonderful weekend.

We hiked in the woods, exploring the paths around our new home and eventually finding our way through the forest to the Great Brook Farm State Park ice cream stand. (As Rick says, what are the odds that our two sequential addresses in Carlisle would both be within walking distance to Carlisle’s two ice cream stands, respectively?) We hosted our new neighbors for drinks and appetizers (and both couples brought blossoming plants as gifts, so the house remains filled with floral fragrance even as last week’s beautiful bouquet is dying off). I went to church and had no responsibilities once I arrived: just sat and enjoyed the Palm Sunday/Passover/pre-Easter/Holy Week sermon. We pulled our bikes out of winter storage, dusted and oiled them, pumped up the tires, and the kids and I did a little ride down the street and back. I ran a total of 9.1 miles: 5.1 on Saturday and 4.0 Sunday. We loafed in the hot tub. We visited with my parents and checked out the new calf, now christened Alice. I even filled our birdfeeders.

Exercise, nature, church, friends, family. It really doesn’t get any better than that, does it?

It wasn’t quite as decadent as I’m making it sound. I did some housework, too. I cleaned all four bathrooms (how our mission to downsize ended up in one additional full bathroom for me to clean is still not quite clear to me) and vacuumed the rugs.

But it felt good to be doing housework. For months, all my household time has been consumed in issues related to moving. First there were months of preparing for open houses and showings. Then we packed, and cleaned some more. Then we arrived here and spent two weeks unpacking. During most of that time, I neglected ordinary housekeeping routines because there was so much else to do.

As of Friday, the last box within our living space has been unpacked and disposed of. There are still untouched boxes in the garage and basement – items we either don’t need right away, like holiday decorations and winter sports equipment, or items we don’t really need at all but will never get rid of, like all of my old journals and my grandmother’s wedding dress – but there are no more cardboard cartons cluttering up our bedroom or kitchen or living room. Emptying the last one out was like seeing the last snow bank melt in the spring: gone, finally, gone.

So much of everything we have done in recent months has been consumed by the enormity of moving. Specific circumstances aside, this is true for any move. It’s just so much work.

And for that reason as well as others, I was so grateful for the joyful normalcy of this past weekend. Grateful to be cleaning sinks and tubs instead of filling boxes. Grateful to be out walking on a forest trail with all four of us and the dog together.

Much remains still undone, both in terms of housework and personal work, but I went to bed last night with a sense of completion and, yet again, gratitude. Normalcy is so often the best reward, bringing both joy and relief. Both emotions filled me as the weekend came to a close.

Reflecting on gratitude

I subscribe to the “Word for the Day” from gratefulness.org, and not only do I receive an inspirational and usually thought-provoking quotation from the site every day in my email inbox, but most of the time I even remember to read them.

The fact that I’ve stayed on this mailing list for about six months is itself a break in tradition for me. I don’t know whether or not other people have this same habit, but I tend to subscribe to online newsletters or daily emails that I think sound interesting and then within two days of signing up wonder why these people are cluttering up my mailbox again. Various posts from Amazon.com; the occasional cooking advice from Epicurious.com; daily recipes from Whole Foods; the ubiquitous Fly Lady: in every case, I saw one promo, believed this was someone I wanted to hear from every day, and then within a week of subscribing found myself scrabbling frantically for the “unsubscribe” button.

But I’ve resisted that reflex when it comes to “Word for the Day,” because so often these quotes are so worthwhile. For that matter, simply requiring myself to stop, read the quote, and reflect on it long enough to decide whether it’s relevant to my life or not is a good discipline for me in slowing down and absorbing text. More often than not, the daily reflection contains at the very least a kernel of thought-provoking sustenance.

And so the ones I like, I keep in my in-box until I feel like I’ve worn out my capacity to reflect on them, whether that happens inside my head, in my journal, on my blog or in some other format. I cull quickly, though; the point isn’t to storehouse these quotes. I keep only those to which I truly believe I’ll take time to give more consideration.

Yesterday I took a moment to scroll through the ones I’d saved in the past few weeks and came across this one from Sarah Ban Breathnach: "Gratitude is the most passionate transformative force in the cosmos. When we offer thanks to God or to another human being, gratitude gifts us with renewal, reflection, reconnection."

Admittedly, it’s fair to say the idea of pausing to observe gratitude is not a new idea for me. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the manuscript readers (or “beta readers”) of my recently published memoir actually grew so weary of my mentions of gratitude for all the good things in my life that she actually scribbled “Enough already!” in the margins, at just the point where I was waxing grateful for the lack of terrorist attacks in my neighborhood. All right, maybe that one was a touch of overkill. But in general, I’m grateful. I’m grateful for all kinds of things.

Nonetheless, I don’t always see it as Sarah Ban Breathnach does: “the most passionate transformative force in the cosmos.” (Because frankly, if that is in fact that case, I’m sort of surprised I’m not more, well…transformed.) But the next part is thought-provoking as well: “…gratitude gifts us with renewal, reflection, reconnection.”

So where does the truth lie? Am I merely a Pollyanna, as my manuscript reader suggested when she confessed to being exasperated with all my expressions of gratitude? Or am I indeed on a path of continuous transformation, exerting positive energy throughout the cosmos?

Just in case it’s the latter, I’ll take a moment for gratitude today. I’m grateful that after the pump malfunctioned yesterday in the barnyard, leaving me with no way to fill the animals’ trough with water other than shoveling in heaps of snow, it inexplicably started working again several hours later; and I’m grateful that the electricity stayed on all day – last week’s five-hour blackout left me with a full season’s worth of appreciation for heat and light – and I’m grateful that I made strong inroads on the work that I have on deadline this week for three different clients.

Gratitude is definitely a positive force. One that transforms the cosmos? Probably so, if applied liberally enough on the macro level. Today, I’m grateful on the micro level for those things that worked out well yesterday. And I’ll continue to look for reasons to express gratitude today.

Yes, again with the gratitude

Two different people, unbeknownst to each other, commented in the past couple of weeks that I write too much about gratitude. “We get it, you’re a really good person and you’re always appreciative of everything,” said one of them. The other was more terse: she simply scrawled in the margin of a draft I had asked her to review, next to a passage about how grateful I was for the blessings of the present, “Enough already.”

And yet it’s hard to internalize this particular critique, the way I might if, for example, someone were to say (quite rightly) that I should use fewer adverbs or not always give examples in sets of three. When I get those kinds of criticisms, I tend to incorporate the recommendations swiftly into my writing. But cutting back on adverbs seems to be easier than cutting back on gratitude.

So once again, I find myself thinking about gratitude. Because my two critics were right: it is something I tend to, well, dwell on. But often I write about gratitude for big things, like an absence of current terrorist attacks or the fact that my children are so physically and mentally healthy. I still sometimes catch myself overlooking the smaller reasons for gratitude. Two days ago, I posted a comment on Twitter about starting my day with a two-mile run and then a cup of coffee. Someone I don’t even know, writing under the umbrella of a sports company, posted this response to my note: “A two-mile run followed by some coffee sounds like a perfect start to the week. Keep it up.”

My initial response, I’m sorry to admit, was a bit of an eye-roll. Keep it up? My running streak is now three years and almost three months long. Going on a two-mile run and then drinking a cup of hot coffee is how approximately 95% of my days begin. I’ve run every day for the past 1,180 days. I don’t really need to be urged to “Keep it up.”

But then I read it again, and this time stopped on the first sentence: “A two-mile run followed by some coffee sounds like a perfect start to the week.” Yes. It is a perfect start to the week. And it’s how most of my weeks start. Also how they middle and end.

But it’s little things like this that I sometimes forget to observe with gratitude. My days start with a run and coffee: what could be better? My workdays consist of sitting in a sunny kitchen in a quiet house writing for pay: what could be better? Most evenings, those when I don’t have meetings or social commitments or errands to do, I change into sweats after dinner and read to my kids: what could be better?

My mother told me an informative story recently. She receives her mail at the post office rather than by delivery. Because the paper recycling piles up so fast at home, with all the catalogs, envelopes and inserts that arrive in the mail day after day, she throws whatever she doesn’t want into the recycling bin at the post office before she leaves. Sometimes she even reads the mail while standing at the post office counter and leaves it in the recycling there. (I have a post office box also and do all of these same things.)

Last week, she received a form letter with the results of a routine mammogram. The letter said that the results showed no cause for concern and she should come back in a year. She told me she dropped it in the recycling bin…and then rethought the action. “That’s important,” she thought. “A healthy mammogram? That’s not just a piece of paper to send to the shredder. That’s a big deal. That’s a piece of paper worth bringing home.” It wasn’t just a matter of being generally grateful for good health, which, like me, she always consciously is; it was this particular piece of paper bearing good news: something small and tangible for which to be thankful.

So I’m holding on to that Twitter post because it reminds me that even though I start nearly every day with running and coffee, it’s still a nearly perfect way to start the day. I’m grateful for it. And yes, I say that a lot. But my coffee mug is like my mom’s slip of paper: nothing good should go randomly into the shredder, literally or metaphorically. So I’ll keep that post to remind myself of just how grateful I should be, yet again.

A cow in need is a friend indeed

Staying up all night with a fussy baby is a timeless element of parenting in that nearly all parents go through it, but it’s also usually a phase of limited duration. And although a friend of mine once wrote an essay about how she misses being up at 2 AM in a rocker looking out at the moon, I didn’t believe her. It’s been over six or seven years since I was up at night with a fussy baby, and I still frequently wake in the morning grateful for an uninterrupted night of sleep.

So I wasn’t very happy to wake shortly after midnight last night to hear a bellowing cow. Steady, repeated, high-volume mooing went on for the next three hours. Occasionally there would be a break, and I’d fall asleep, and then it would inevitably start up again. MOO! … MOO! … MOO!

Even with middle-of-the-night drowsiness, it wasn’t hard for me to make an educated guess about what had happened. I can’t actually tell the half-dozen cows on our farm apart by their voices, but Gracie is the only one with a new calf and I did recognize this sound: the bellowing moo of a cow calling to her calf. So I knew that either the baby bull born last weekend was stuck somewhere and couldn’t get free, or had wandered off to someplace Gracie did not want him to be, or something worse had befallen him and he was dead or incapacitated. I certainly hoped the latter wasn’t the case – we do have a lot of coyotes around this summer, but I’ve never heard of a coyote attacking a calf – but the reality is that in the dark of night, there’s just not a lot to do about it. So Rick and I tried to sleep.

When dawn broke, Rick headed out to investigate. I heard a few more bellowing moos and then silence. Wonderful sweet silence. I fell asleep at last and slept until eight.

Rick told the kids and me at breakfast that as soon as he stepped outside, Gracie stopped mooing and walked toward him. Then she started mooing again as if urging him to follow her, which he did. Gracie brought him to the gate separating the two pastures, from where Rick could see that the calf had slipped through the sheep’s gate to spend the night among the bulls.

Rick crossed into the bulls’ pasture, made his way behind the small calf, and coaxed him back through the sheep’s gate. “And then Gracie went like this: ‘Mmmm. Mmmm.’” Rick told us. Not a bellowing moo like before; a murmur of thanks.

Though he tends to be unsentimental about the animals, I could tell Rick was pleased on a number of levels. He’d solved the problem; Gracie’s appreciation was obvious and almost human; and even Gracie’s reaction when he first stepped outside was gratifying: she approached him with apparent relief, as if she knew he could help her. That kind of trust, whether it comes from friends, animals or children, is always a good feeling.

My kids sometimes tease me at how delighted I always am when anyone asks me for directions. Of course, with the advent of GPS, it happens less and less, but since we live on a main road and often walk along it, we do get a fair number of requests for navigational help. And it just feels good to set people on their way. On a different order of magnitude, at church we all sign up to deliver casseroles when someone has had surgery or has lost a family member, and this summer I was part of a large group of women who took turns sending daily greeting cards to a member of our circle who was dealing with an illness.

Helping feels good: it’s that simple. Whether we’re helping a friend, a neighbor, a stranger or a cow, it’s gratifying to meet someone else’s need. Explaining why may be complicated, but sensing the truth of it isn’t. Rick could even see it in Gracie’s big bovine eyes.

An extraordinary ordinary day

Saturday was by most measures an ordinary day for us.

By that, I mean it was not an extraordinary day. Within our realm, things happened that typically happen on a summer Saturday.

And yet when I stopped for a moment at the end of the day to itemize in my mind how the day had passed, as I often do, I marveled.

At Farmers Market, as we sold the kids’ weekly inventory of banana bread, we saw old friends and met new ones. Holly wandered merrily around the market with our next door neighbor – they are back on peaceable terms after an unfortunate rift earlier in the summer – and used her banana bread profits to buy earrings and dog biscuits. I bought corn picked that same morning along with three different colors of tomatoes, a large bunch of basil, and a bag of fingerling potatoes. When the market ended, I chopped the tomatoes to make a salsa.

Holly and I had errands to do in the afternoon; we drove several miles on a superhighway and returned home safely. Ordinary. And yet also remarkable. Late in the afternoon, I ran four and a half miles. Ordinary for me, and yet remarkable that I’m blessed with the physical wellness to be able to do this.

Every facet of our day, when I stop to contemplate it, shares this duality: ordinary, and yet extraordinary. Ordinary in that it’s typical for us; extraordinary in that who are we to be so blessed?

Later in the evening we went to a restaurant where we were served far more food than we needed. People in our own country and all around the world starve, but we sent back half our bread basket and took home leftovers from our entrees. Back home, Tim called us from Maine to say he was having fun with his grandparents: he’d gone boating all afternoon and eaten lobster rolls for dinner. How is it possible that we inhabit an existence in which this is ordinary?

All of it seems astonishing to me, when examined. Friends at Farmers Market and abundant food on the table and safe highway travels and strong happy children. Fresh tomatoes. Walls and a roof. Bacitracin for a cut Holly incurred. Books piled on the nightstand, all the books we could possibly want.

This feeling is what I think memoirist Katrina Kenison calls “The Gift of an Ordinary Day,” the title of her last book. The sense of wonder we can take from what is remarkable simply because it happens to us, undeserved and unsurprising. This is what I missed most in the days after September 11th: ordinary days, days filled with aspects both lovely and routine, so easy to overlook, but at the same time begging to be admired, like the brilliant zinnias and the red and orange tomatoes at Farmers Market.

An ordinary day. Undeserved and yet granted to me anyway. I’m blessed with this magnificent reality, and all I can do is wonder at it.

A one-day-long gratitude list

A few days ago, my sister wrote a Facebook post listing all her favorite elements of the summer so far. A gratitude list, essentially. Reading it underscored for me the fact that I’ve been a little bit whinier than usual in the past few weeks, dwelled a little bit too much, perhaps, on those parts of the summer that aren’t going exactly right. I should do a gratitude list too, I told myself then. Even if I feel more preoccupied right now with the not-so-great parts, I should remind myself of all that is truly great, as Sarah did: things like fresh peaches and unrushed mornings.

But today I could actually just list everything that happened to me yesterday and that in itself would compose a gratitude list, because yesterday was in many ways such a terrific day. We’re staying at my parents’ vacation condo in Portland for a couple of nights. My day started with reading a copy of Poets & Writers magazine and drinking coffee on the balcony overlooking the harbor while I waited for the kids to wake up. Once dressed and fed, they walked down to the corner store in search of a newspaper for me. They didn’t find the one I wanted, but they returned home full of the good cheer and harmony that result when I send them out together on the kind of walking errands they can’t do at home.

Later in the day, my friend Anjali and her daughters Elena and Vanessa arrived for a visit. Like yesterday, the kids wanted to play in the boat for a while, which was fine with us. Then Anjali and the girls went window-shopping around town, which gave me the chance for a good long run.

When I got back to the condo, Anjali and the girls were still out so I thought I’d go on a quick bike ride to try to solve some mysteries of the city’s geography that had been puzzling me. “Maybe Tim will go with me,” I thought, but knew it was unlikely because he was engrossed in one of his knights-and-dragons novels. “Sure, I’ll go with you,” he said when I asked. What a welcome surprise. We rode down alongside the Harbor and then up to Munjoy Hill and back along the Eastern Promenade, and returned from our bike ride just as the window shoppers returned.

After that we were all tired and needed some down time: Tim and Elena both read, Holly listened to a book on tape, Vanessa rested, Anjali and I talked. Then we went out to dinner and Tim and Holly each ate a massive bowl of steamed clams.

Afterwards, the kids played tag in an empty section of the parking lot. (Credit the First Lady: whereas once I’d see that and think “I hope they’re not in any danger of traffic or inconveniencing anyone,” now my first thought is “Oh good, they’re burning calories.”)

As promised, I took the three older kids to the candy store for dessert while Anjali headed back to the condo with Vanessa Although it took about twenty minutes of contemplation and negotiation for each of the three kids to settle on what they wanted, I couldn’t have asked for a better reward at the end: the young woman at the counter saying to me, “You have really well-behaved children. And I work all day in a candy shop, so believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I see the worst of the worst here!” And as if that wasn’t reward enough, the chocolate-covered marshmallow caramel was the perfect way to end the day.

So, my gratitude list, not even for the whole summer but just for yesterday: coffee on the balcony, happy kids, running, biking, playing in the boat, Tim and Holly’s joy over steamed clams, friends visiting, watching the kids play tag, compliments at the chocolate shop, caramel with marshmallows. What a great day. Listing the highlights, of which there were so many, just serves to remind me that on some days the moments of joy are obvious and other days they’re more subtle, but they are always there to be found. Just look. Every day, just look. And then, when possible, take time to make a list.

A moment for ingratitude

Gratitude is such a fundamentally important emotion to recognize: gratitude for everything from healthy children to roofs over our heads to, as Emily says when she returns briefly from the afterlife in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, “coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths… and sleeping and waking up.”

Yet last night I found myself wondering if my ceaseless quest to carry gratitude into all aspects of my life was drowning out some other thoughts that might deserve a moment or two of free expression. I was feeling anxious about some things and irritable about others, and yet every time I tried to focus on those emotions, all I could hear was my conscience saying “No, be grateful, be grateful.”

And for the most part, that’s true: what I am blessed with and what I should feel grateful for so overpowers what I might be anxious or irritable about. So there’s another six inches of rain in the forecast? Be grateful that unlike the earthquake survivors in Haiti, you’ll be inside your house as the rain falls. Yes, says a small voice, but we somehow have to solve the problem of the driveway washing out again, and I haven’t done anything about it. The car needs servicing? How lucky that you have a reputable auto shop a mile away and enough money to pay the bill. Yes, says that same small voice, I know that, but the mechanic actually said I need to take it to the dealer to have something else checked out, and somehow I’m going to have to find time for that trip, and spend still more money on it… The kids’ clamor at the dinner table was making my skull vibrate? Well, there are people whose children don’t talk at all. Statistically, you’re remarkably lucky not to have any autism in the family. Yes, true, but it was still a lot of noise at the dinner table when I could have used just a little bit of peace and calm. A client gave a somewhat acrimonious reception to some work you just finished? Be glad for employment. Of course, but it still hurts my feelings when clients don’t like my work.

What I’m beginning to suspect is that about 90% of the time it’s crucial to let gratitude overrule all other emotions, but that there are moments nonetheless when ingratitude deserves just a moment of acknowledgment. I need to complain, carp, whine. I need to ask gratitude to just hush for a moment so someone else can have a turn to talk.

My 11-year-old returned from an excursion with friends recently. As he was saying goodbye to them, I interrupted rather obtrusively to ask if he had thanked them for bringing him along. “You always do that when we drop him off!” chided the parent of Tim’s friend. “Of course he thanked us. He always does. And now he’s trying to tell us about something and you’re interrupting to remind him to thank us yet again.”

That parent was right to call me on it: saying thank you is good manners, but I wasn’t giving Tim a chance to say anything else as the get-together ended. And sometimes I do the same thing to myself. Gratitude matters, but allow negativity to have a voice every now and then. Purge it and get back to the gratitude. Yes, shelter is a magnificent luxury when it’s raining, but for a moment let’s just allow ourselves to feel how cold and wet the rain is. It’s okay. You can say thank you some more in a moment, but for this particular second in time, acknowledge what’s not so great. Because it, too, matters.

Giving thanks for...the kids' clutter (really!)

Having planned in the week leading up to Thanksgiving to count down the days in my blog by giving thanks for the various non-essential delights that grace my life, you’d think I’d be extra attuned this week to anything that might meet the criteria. The general idea is to go beyond what I call the massive things – the presence of family and friends; physical and mental health; food; shelter; freedom – and acknowledge the many other beloved everyday things that might not make it into a Thanksgiving toast.

But after I mentioned in another communication that due to an inexplicable failure of wireless connectivity in my home office I’ve been working today in my son’s room, at his little wooden desk, surrounded by his sports pennants and baseball cards, Twitter correspondent Jack Ferriter pointed out to me that there’s another item for my list of non-essential but wonderful things worthy of Thanksgiving week thanks: the clutter of toys and other paraphernalia that reflect my kids’ presence in the house.

Of course, when it comes time to pick up all their stuff, thankful is often the last thing I’m feeling (unless my inspiration for picking everything up off the floor is the imminent monthly arrival of the housecleaner, for which I always give thanks). But it’s true: our children’s beloved chotchkes remind us of their unique qualities, their hobbies, their passions, their idiosyncrasies. In Lionel Shriver’s mesmerizingly horrifying novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, one way Shriver conveys the character’s psychopathic tendencies is by describing the sterile tidiness of his childhood room, in which not a toy or game or stuffed animal or book mars the surface of the furniture or floor. This detail has stuck with me for years in its ability to imply a child’s chillingly un-childlike personality.

So when I view the clutter that follows my kids around like Pigpen’s dust cloud in Peanuts, I remind myself to feel grateful.

Along with the sports pennants on the wall and the baseball cards scattered across his desk, Tim’s most prized objects include his 10-year-old stuffed frog, Ba, and his newer but somewhat shabby gray elephant, Vicon. Both animals can usually be found draped across whatever chair or tabletop is nearest to Tim if he’s in the house; when he’s at school he leaves them on the mudroom bench so that he’ll see them as soon as he gets home. Tim also treasures the race numbers he collected at a series of road races he ran over the past two years as well as myriad baseball trophies and ribbons, and the coin collection his grandfather gave him, and a pile of baseball hats from every team he’s ever played on.

Holly’s clutter is a little less resonant with significance than Tim’s. Whereas Tim’s clutch of special belongings comprises things he’s had for a long time that are infused with special meaning to him, Holly just plain collects odds and ends, most of which she eventually uses in crafts projects (or plans to, anyway. Or so she says). Strewn across the rug in Holly’s room are beads of all sizes, straws, pipe cleaners, barrettes, recipe cards, paper clips, post-it notes. “Can I have that?!!” she pleads when I remove the disposable packaging from almost any grocery, whether it’s the cardboard carton that strawberries are packed in or the Styrofoam tray from a package of drumsticks. Kleenex boxes, cereal boxes, egg cartons: they all end up in Holly’s room. Last month I made pumpkin cupcakes for Halloween; now the unused cupcake papers are on her bookshelf. She loves to collect little odds and ends of all kinds. What isn’t to be used in a crafts project instead becomes a stand-in for a character in one of her imaginary play scenarios. One day she was engrossed in a game of imaginary school in the kitchen while I prepared dinner. I plucked a piece of dried macaroni that somehow hadn’t made it into the pot of boiling water with the others off the floor and threw it away. “Mom!” she gasped, horrified, “that’s the principal!”

So Jack Ferriter is right: their possessions, permanent and temporary, valuable and disposable, are all items to be thankful for, because these trinkets and chotchkes represent their personalities, for which I am always grateful. And if it sometimes seems that I spend a lot of time picking tiny beads out of the soles of my feet or dusting baseball trophies, I suppose it’s a small price to pay compared to the gratitude I feel for my unique and wonderful children.

Giving thanks for...running!

Continuing my Thanksgiving countdown with gratitude for the less-than-massive things that enhance my life, I suppose it’s no surprise that eventually I would get to the topic of running.

Being grateful for good health and physical (as well as mental) well-being falls into the category of massive things to be grateful for, but the simple act of running takes a more granular view. I’m grateful that my physiological profile includes the strength, mobility and stamina to run, but I’m also just grateful that running exists. As I’ve been reminded hundreds of times throughout my adult life, running isn’t for everyone. There are some people, even physically able people, who are injury-prone and clearly just not destined to be runners; there are others who could do it but just dislike it. Running tends to be something you either love or hate. I’m really grateful to fall into the former category. I love running and have ever since I was eighteen years old and took up running during my first summer vacation from college.

I’ve run regularly everywhere I’ve ever lived, though that isn’t that many places: the Fenway and Kenmore neighborhoods in Boston surround my college campus when I first started, Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood where I lived just after college, the areas around our first apartment in Framingham and then our first home on the other side of the same town, and now the various running routes I’ve established from our Carlisle home.

I haven’t lived many places, but I’ve traveled a lot, and run everywhere I’ve visited. Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, California, Colorado, Florida, Wyoming (one of the most memorable runs I’ve taken was outside of Cody, Wyoming. I picked out a single tree on the horizon and started running down the horizon toward it. Twenty-five minutes, which is to say about 2.5 miles, later I reached that tree, turned around and ran back. It’s the only place I’ve ever run where I could see my halfway point from my starting line.). Also England, France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Venezuela, Aruba, Bermuda (which from a traffic perspective was the most dangerous place I’ve run. From the perspective of sheer bad judgment, I’d vote for Venezuela. Suffice to say endorphins can be a dangerous drug. But on the subject of judgment, the one place I didn’t run was in Kenya, because the safari guides bluntly forbid it). I ran on the open-air track on the top deck of a cruise ship plying the waters of the eastern Caribbean. I’ve run with my sisters, my brothers-in-law, a cousin, my nieces, friends and co-workers, but mostly over the years I’ve run alone, other than the two years during which my son Tim and I ran together nearly every day. I’ve had two different dogs as regular running partners over the years. I’ve listened to good music, bad music, restaurant review shows, football games and tens of thousands of hours of NPR while running.

So when people look at my running record and call me committed, I say no, just lucky. During the two-year daily running streak that my son Tim and I did together, I was always a little sheepish when people said they were impressed; to me it was astoundingly good fortune that neither of us was sick, injured or otherwise unable to run during those 732 days. Now that I’m continuing with the daily running streak alone – and on day 835 as of this afternoon – I continue to feel remarkably lucky. An H1N1 fever or broken bone could be all it would take to compel me to take a day off, and so far that hasn’t happened.

So mostly, during this week of Thanksgiving, I feel grateful for good health in big ways: the absence of serious illness or disability. But I also feel thankful for the sheer joy that daily running brings me, and has for seemingly as long now as I can remember. It could end any time (as could everything I’m thankful for). But I’m so glad for it right now, on this day, with the hope that I’ll be out running again tomorrow.

Gratitude for a great day

What a great day. There are days when something huge happens, like your wedding, and days when something amazing happens, like you get into your first-choice college, and all kinds of really special days when significant and unforgettable things occur. But days like today are more like a string of smooth iridescent beads on a necklace: not the valuable jewels of a family heirloom, not showy enough for a celebrity to wear to the Oscars, maybe not even quite elegant enough to wear to a job interview, but just somehow beautiful, with a simple perfection worth celebrating.

First of all, we weren’t rushed this morning. Since Tim started school five years ago, get-out-the-door morning chaos has been my nemesis. Whether we biked or drove or caught the bus, mornings were always stressful and rushed. But this fall has been easier. The kids get up earlier and finish breakfast before they have to, and Tim is ready to leave in plenty of time. That’s what happened today. He ate, brushed his teeth, collected his things for school, and I drove him to the bus stop, all a few minutes ahead of schedule.

Holly dressed herself without complaint and, given the choice of driving or walking to the bus stop (it’s about a third of a mile), surprised me by agreeing to walk. The sun was shining; the foliage felt thick and lush from yesterday’s rain. Some of the leaves are still bright green, others gold, some pale yellow, and a few already crimson or chartreuse. But all so abundant. Walking down the long driveway was like moving through the inside of a kaleidoscope.

I dug into the day’s foremost work priority, writing copy for a medical website: a task more intimidating than tedious. By 11, the dog was pestering me for a run, so we headed out. At first I was surprised by a tinge of fall briskness in the air, but as we headed toward the town center I realized it was warm in the sun, and we were both so happy to be out. The high school kids had the day off for Yom Kippur, and all along the mile to the center we passed small groups of teenagers. Charlie Fitzpatrick was doing yardwork, and a boy from church was pushing his bike along the path as he chatted with two girls I didn’t recognize. More kids were walking along closer to the Center. What a glowing picture they painted of teenagers on a day off from school.

When we got back, the run had rejuvenated my energy enough that I finished the medical copywriting, which was a big relief, and I made a delicious lunch: meatless soy “ground beef” and black beans heated with black olives, sliced tomatoes, grated cheddar cheese and avocado chunks, plus some tortilla chips crumbled on top. For dessert, a big (unnecessarily big, but I savored every bite) slice of the chocolate zucchini cake I made over the weekend.

A little more writing in the afternoon and then time with the kids when they got home from school. Tim and I played two games of ping pong: first he crushed me, 21-9 or something like that, and then I beat him 21-13. When we were done playing, the spanikopita I’d made earlier was ready to come out of the oven: buttery, savory, almost as good as the one I made for the teachers’ luncheon last week. (It wasn’t possible for this one to quite match up, because the one from last week was the one we couldn’t eat, so of course it looked just a little bit better!)

Now it’s softly raining, which is a sound I love at bedtime. So: great day from beginning to end. And yet…while someone, me, is having a great day, it’s someone else’s worst day. Soldiers are dying, children are starving, and my parents have a friend who is the subject of a police search because he has been missing for over a week. Sometimes it’s hard to reconcile having such a happy day while knowing other people are miserable. But I don’t think it makes sense to ignore the good things on that basis, either. So, we notice and celebrate the small good everyday moments, knowing that there will always be someone suffering while we are rejoicing, and knowing too that the opposite might come as well, in time. But believing that appreciating what is good in everyday life is still the right thing to do.