I am grateful that I have experienced many things.

Some wonderful, some horrible.

And to enjoy what Nathanial Hawthorne called “an intercourse with the world”.

These are the words that Oliver Sacks expressed as he neared the end of his life, the words that read like heartbreak and love to a twenty-something year old terrified of nothing more than the concept of forgetting to live. Forgetting to love.

WISDOM FROM OLIVER SACKS

In the same essay, “Mercury”, Dr. Sacks writes,

“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

– Oliver Sacks, “Mercury”

Every since reading Insomniac City, Dr. Sacks remains an enigmatic figure in my mind, one that I wish more than anything that I could have had a conversation with. Or, share a bottle of wine with on the snowy rooftop of his apartment in New York City as he did with Bill Hayes, talking about the elements, mercury, potassium, carbon. Gratitude, love, life.

But since his breath has long since become air, I write this ode instead. An ode appropriate for today, for Thanksgiving, but really, to be more universal, for simply giving thanks.

HOLISTIC GRATITUDE

I think that gratitude can carry a lot of pressure. It’s often an exercise of going around the table and stating what beautiful things are in your life, dancing right under you nose. Family, friends, food. Good fortune, love, happiness. These are the accepted answers.

Yet, in my relatively short time upon this planet, I have always felt the most grateful for the things that were not easy, the things that pushed me into becoming someone better than I was. The hard things. Surviving those things, and learning how to survive them, is what strikes the most gratitude.

So I love that Dr. Sacks wraps gratitude around the whole of his life. The good, the bad, the extraordinary and the mundane. It might be my favorite thesis of life, this gentle gratitude for of the things that we endure. It doesn’t need to be a shameful dinner conversation about who has the best life, the most love, but rather who has the most awareness for the beauty of the life that they were given. The life that they have built, and the hands that have helped.

Dr. Sacks, when facing death, looked at his life and measured it with that awareness. A successful, brilliant neurologist and author, he simply thanked the world for letting him perceive it. Feel it. Think deeply about it in that endless way that writers do.

JOANNA MACY’S HOT TAKE

The aura of his words remind me of another wise soul who writes,

“We have received an inestimable gift. To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe—to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it—is a wonder beyond words…an extraordinary privilege.”

– Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self

I dare you to proclaim that at your dinner table tonight.

Going hand in hand with Dr. Sacks, Macy gnaws at the very core of what it means to be fully alive, and to know it. Taped to my bedroom mirror is a crinkled scrap of paper on which I once scrawled:

Thank you life for having me, for cementing my bones and pouring my blood. Most days this world feels like light upon my skin.

I wrote that line at some time during 2020 when we were all recategorizing our lives with new perspectives, and it remains on my mirror as a guide. A light. A love child of Macy and Dr. Sack’s shared ideology when it comes to gratitude and when it comes to living well. The one that states that to simply be a part of this chaotic world with a mind that can perceive it’s brilliance is perhaps the entire point.

That is what I am grateful for this year.

Abstract devotion.

Happy day(s) of thanks. ❤

Love always, m.

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