Hi Everyone,
At the risk of boring you, I am going to talk about gratitude, thanks giving, and yes, I know we aren’t remotely near the American (turkey & trimmings). Thanksgiving Day, which is 150 days away as I write this. Why thanks giving, an appreciation for the good at hand, rather than a blog about the insufferable heat we recently experienced in the UK, where in Oxford, according to our own Radcliffe Meteorological Station, temperatures topped out at 34.3°C (93.7°F), which one author suggested might be “hotter than Satan’s ar*ehole”?
Yup, I am glad that is gone.
At 71 years of age (71.5 to be exact), I sometimes think I have a bit of wisdom and then at other times no smarts at all or it seems a sort of foolishness, but when it comes to gratitude, I might have a handle on that. So I offer you this knowledge in the hopes it might provide you (if you don’t already have it or if you might actually concur) with a bit of a golden key, an energy shift, a means of changing the mental/emotional/spiritual focus, which is often the thing that bogs me down.
It seems ancient history now – and why not, as one of my novels Geraniums, set in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, was described as historical fiction, as was Mine set in the late 1990s and early 2000s – when I recall the wise words of a woman who served as a sort of mother surrogate or at least a mentor. When I was stalled in the minutiae of life, she said to me, “Change the channel, Marlene!”
Change the channel? What am I, a TV station? Impossible, I thought then, and often feel today until I get brought up short by my own bellyaching. “Change the channel!” To what? I thought then, and when caught off guard I still think now. “The good already at hand,” I hear her now as she once said back then in the “olden times”.
The idea of good already at hand, gratitude, how did it slip away? Yes, I think, count! Two hands, two legs, all fingers and toes, family and friends, a sunflower about to bloom, groceries delivered at home, a son safe with traction in the desire of his dreams (not mine), a pup and a kitten who tussle happily, a past I don’t need to close the door on, a present with a garden of roses, poppies, old vines not planted on my own, and a future beckoning from all the details of the grateful day at hand.
So, yes, when things appear to go south, sour or the everyday seems a dry and dusty plateau, I hear my old mentor say “Change the channel!” and know I don’t really have to go anywhere, do anything new. I only need to stop, look, listen (whether historical fiction or not) at my life parading itself anew, with all the good, invisibly gone, reappearing for my own special view.
How could I forget? “Change the channel.” See it all anew. An old-fashioned woman who took the time to share a pithy bit of wisdom in a simple barb strong enough to last a lifetime.
Enjoy July!
Love,