Goodnight Moon (and goodnight Victor Hugo and Ralph Waldo Emerson)

When you have laboriously accomplished your daily tasks, go to sleep in peace. God is awake. 

- Victor Hugo

I’m not sure when I first read this quotation – I don’t think it was more than about six months ago – but it’s one of those quotations that made less of an impression on me upon first reading than it has in the time since with its sticking power. I didn’t dwell on it or commit it to memory when I first came across it, but recently I think of it almost every night as I get ready to go to bed. It reminds me of the sense of serenity from acknowledging that the day is done and it is time for closure on all that the day involved.

Sometimes, too, I find myself thinking about the other ways that this idea has been expressed in the common vernacular. I think of taps: “Day is done. Gone the sun. ….All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.” And I think of Goodnight Moon, when I’m shutting down my computer, only I like to rephrase it as “Goodnight email. Goodnight calendar. Goodnight Facebook friends everywhere.”

All of these examples convey the same idea: there is a time to acknowledge that the day’s work is done. In the past, I’ve so often found it easier to rebuke myself for all that didn’t get done as the day ends than to accept it. Housework left incomplete. Interviews for the following day that I haven’t prepared for all that well. Emails I haven’t yet returned. Errands I’m procrastinating on for yet another day.

And it’s so easy to get entrenched in these negative thoughts of what didn’t happen that you overlook what did: another day brought to an ultimately successful conclusion.

But somehow these words make it easier for me. Goodnight to this day, I tell myself now with Victor Hugo’s lines in mind. I’ve done what I can and it’s someone else’s turn to keep watch now that it’s nighttime.

But, interestingly, once I decided I wanted to try to write a blog post about this half-remembered quote, I couldn’t recall who wrote it, and I had the idea that it was by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Finally I found it, and saw that it was not Emerson but Hugo, but then realized there was another Emerson quote with which I was confusing it:

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Emerson, Unitarian minister that he is, doesn’t bring God into it; he simply gives us the responsibility for finding closure on the day ourselves. Never mind God keeping watch, Emerson seems to say; the point is still that your work is done and you are ready to begin again tomorrow.

I like both quotes. I like the text of Goodnight Moon too. I like the idea that it is all right to just walk away from undone or half-done tasks at the end of the day. Because as both writers say, there’s time enough tomorrow to try it all again.

  

Motivational words from a 13-year-old

I find words of inspiration in so many places. The works of Shakespeare. The journal entries of Thoreau. The poetry of t.s. eliot and Mary Oliver. Essays by Barbara Kingsolver. Church sermons and motivational speeches. But earlier this week, it was the words of a 13-year-old from Belmont that made me reverse course and do the right thing.

The crux of my role as library volunteer coordinator is to ensure that I’ve scheduled one or two volunteers to cover each classroom shift in the school library to assist the full-time librarian. Usually it all goes smoothly until winter hits, and then random viruses, extemporaneous vacations and bad weather cause my volunteers to start dropping like flies, at which point it becomes my responsibility to step in and do it myself.

In this case, it wasn’t even a last-minute call. This particular volunteer had let me know two days in advance that she couldn’t cover her shift. I’d already depleted all my library substitute resources for the week, so I told her not to worry about it; I could cover it myself. I put it on my Google calendar and promptly forgot about it.

When the ten-minute warning alarm sounded on my iPhone midmorning, I couldn’t imagine what the warning was for. I was in the middle of drafting an article and was sure I didn’t have any appointments scheduled for the day. And it was still hours until I had to meet Holly’s bus.

But when I glanced at the screen on my phone, there it was: 11 a.m. library shift. I’d absolutely forgotten.

Can’t do it, I immediately told myself. Too busy. The school librarian can manage without me. She appreciates us volunteers helping out, but she won’t mind covering by herself this once. I won’t even tell her I was supposed to do it; I’ll just tell her that the usual volunteer had to cancel and I didn’t have anyone else to cover. She’ll never know that it was actually me who reneged on the commitment.

And then for some reason, I remembered an interview I’d done a few weeks ago. I was talking to a 13-year-old named Nelson about his decision to step forward and initiate a fundraiser for the genetic condition from which his brother suffers. This was a big step for this young man. He didn’t normally talk much about the fact that his brother was nonverbal and mobility-impaired. And in the particular group that was looking for a cause to support with a fundraiser concert – the 13-year-old’s afterschool music program – he was new and hardly knew any of the other kids yet.

There was no reason, he had previously thought, to discuss his personal life and talk about his brother’s difficult situation with them. For all they knew, his family life was just like theirs, and he was happy to keep it that way.

But then, he told me during our interview, a thought came to his head. If no one else knew about his brother, it was a sure thing that no one else was going to suggest dedicating their fundraiser to research for this condition. Nelson was the only person in the room who had the set of information necessary to propose this idea – and, he realized at that moment, if he didn’t do it, no one else would. Or, as he put it, “My philosophy is that if you’re the only person who can do something and you don’t do it, it’s not going to get done. So I just went up there and talked.”

I thought of Nelson in the moments after my calendar alarm went off. True, I could get away with skipping library duty. No terrible consequence would come of it. On the other hand, I was the only one who knew it needed to be done. In this particular case, it was more my responsibility than anyone else’s in the entire world. Just as Nelson said, if I didn’t do it, it was a sure thing that no one else would.

So I went up to the library and did my volunteer shift. As always, it was easy and fun. Yes, it took an hour out of my workday, but somehow I managed to make up for it by the time the day was over. And Nelson was absolutely right: when you’re the only person who can do a thing, you’d darn well better do it.

Lesson learned, from the most unlikely of places. I love Nelson’s philosophy. It’s a quote you might never see in calligraphy on a wall hanging or inscribed in a book. But it was a fine reminder to me of how to do the right thing, and I feel sure that the words of Nelson Barnett will stay in my mind for a long time – and, I hope, ring out loud and clear once again the next time I’m in a dilemma about whether or not to step forward.

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.