Gratitude
I see people. Every day, I see them. Ostensibly, they’re there for a dental appointment but of course everything’s connected. I hear of sudden deaths, grinding mental illnesses, slow goodbyes. If I release the exigencies of those days from my mind, it leaves me with this low note: there’s not a lot we can do to make sure we are here tomorrow. We have the time we have, and nobody, no-thing knows when that time will run out.
Does this knowledge help me rise to meet the challenges of marriage and fatherhood and personhood? So far, not really, no. This is perhaps because I have assembled a logical progression: if we take A premise as true, then B and C must follow and thus life is precious. When you build your life and your thinking around the opposite, assuming you’ll be there indefinitely, it takes time to restructure from a new, actual, real and true premise: finitude. After all, youth is for the young.
So I’m trying to build a foundation of gratitude. Not gratitude de novo, not one derived from first principles — for that would be exhausting and is likely beyond my lilliputian philosophical understanding and reading. Rather, a gratitude growing from neither abstract reasoning nor current conditions — which is to say, well, one condition: that of being here. I don’t always meet challenges with any sort of composure or big-picture calm. I rarely perceive the grace, the luck, that put me here. But trying to do it is important: I don’t know how many chances I have to get it right.