Finding Joy in Small Things

Someone once quipped: The first sign of insanity is when you wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and then fire off an angry letter to the editor. On a more personal basis, it might be when a person starts a blog and regularly posts cranky denunciations on the subjects of politics and religion.

So, in order to give both you and me a break, I decided to post something more positive. But, first, let me go back several weeks to set the stage.

In the midst of all this unremitting bad news over the past several months, there appeared an article in The Washington Post in July that showed up like a gentle breeze on a hot, summer day and snapped my perspective back in place, if only momentarily. It was titled “Debt crisis, sure, but a good day for life’s tiny joys.”

The author Monica Hesse wrote: “The world appears to have hit a particular nexus of awful: debt ceilings, credit ratings, London riots. One is tempted to go searching, full of hope, for pinpricks of light that poke holes through the black… If one is willing to look hard enough, to go small enough, to recognize that people often don’t measure life in Dow points but in tiny pleasures — extra cream, friendly dogs, pumpkin curry — then Tuesday was an extremely good news day in Washington.”

The ability to downshift is what Andrew Shatté, a professor at the University of Arizona calls resilience. The resilient among us “sort through the muck and find the things we can control,” he says, according to the Post article. “It’s not ignoring the larger problems of the world; it’s finding a way to see them, then see beyond them.”

The poet Mary Oliver wrote: “[What] I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled---to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world."

And in another place she observed: "I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart."

When one enjoys the benefits of health and an adequate income, it is easy to rhapsodize about the small joys of life. But, ironically, in my experience, it is often those who are struggling the most with health and other life challenges who seem most attuned to the blessings of life, large and small.

Whatever the case, on this 10th anniversary of 9/11, divided as we are politically, I suspect all of us Americans, as we look back at that awful day, are of one mind in our gratitude to the first responders and other heroes of New York, Washington, and Shankesville whose memories remind us of what is best about America and us as a people.

Gerald E. Lavey