Howdy.

I hope you all had a beautiful Thanksgiving, if you celebrate.

I got back from Connecticut yesterday after spending the week with my boyfriend and his family. Here are some thoughts on gratitude from said week.

A GOOD THESIS ON LIFE FROM OLIVER SACKS

There are so many things in this world I am endlessly grateful for.

Really cool street art, the authors that have shaped my understanding of the world, the subways of New York City and their bountiful offerings of daily surprises, pennies on sidewalks, Ella Fitzgerald, Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, coffee shops and lemon bread and seasons and fresh flowers from the market each week. The ocean. Trees in all of their stunning states. Funky pants. Funky people.

But there is something more.

Something elusive and ubiquitous that I think of and share each year around this time— a poignant message from Oliver Sacks regarding gratitude. In his dying days, when all perspective came to be most clear, he wrote:

“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 on Gratitude, the Measure of Living, and the Dignity of Dying

WHAT I KNOW

I cannot think of a more stunning thesis on the meaning of life than that.

It is the one that came to me in so many moments during this past week, drowning me in thick swells of gratitude for everything I saw each time I opened my eyes.

A candlelit dinner table with red wine and chocolate pecan pie as the world began to freeze outside. Entire rooms full of people who know and love each other. Three people huddled around a turkey like mad scientists in a lab. Adults clutching glasses of wine and conversing while kids run around them in that way I used to do before I became one of the former. When did I become one of the former? The lines of time and all the little points along the way where one thing became another have never been so hard to read. I was in California last Thanksgiving, baking under the sun, not yet possibly knowing that I would be in Connecticut the very next, sitting by a fire with some beautiful stranger I never knew I would meet on that hot day in July. It all becomes a dream—hazy and nearly impossible to decipher the exact logistics of. There are so many things I do not know.

But this one thing I am sure of.

I have gotten incredibly lucky in this life.

I am walking through the impossibly quiet neighborhoods of Greenwich. It is early morning and we are clutching thermoses of hot coffee in our frozen hands. I look around me and see nothing but nearly-skeletal trees and cozy homes and glassy ponds. It is all a world entirely unknown to me, yet one in which I could not feel more intimately acquainted with.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

I dreamed of the East Coast all throughout my rocky adolescence.

I knew for reasons I could never fully articulate that I had a life waiting for me here. If I could just get through sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, I would escape that ever-tightening labyrinth of loneliness that California began to embody. The walls were closing in on me and scrawled on them were the scenes of my entire life. They danced like cave paintings all around me, their etchings reminding me of everything I had ever been through. There was not room enough for all that I wanted to do and be. But I knew, somehow, with a relentless certainty that dissolved all worry or fear, that fresh, blank walls were somewhere else, waiting for me.

That is where I was one year ago. Doing nothing but simply trusting in that relentless sensation of just knowing.

I am in the somewhere else now. The walls are not closing in anymore. I am sitting around a dining table, listening to people tell stories and laugh in the candlelight and I don’t know how I got here. It is freezing outside. There are no palm trees and I did not skin my knees on any of these streets. Heartbreak is not on that corner and my best friend’s house isn’t around that one. I used to walk around in pools of memory, choking down the past more than I could enjoy the present.

AN ENORMOUS PRIVILEGE

The past is not my home anymore. I got on a plane this year and flew into this life that I clung to the surety of the existence of for no good reason at all. I had no good reason to believe that it would go this way and every great reason to believe it wouldn’t.

I think of Sacks and his idea of it all being the most enormous privilege. I have lived more and loved more in this past year than I know what to do with. For the longest time I was drunk on dreams, grasping in the dark as I clawed my way out of the pandemic, out of college, and out of California, for the life I could feel calling to me. Even still, I was a kid with my feet in the sand and my head in the clouds and I thought I was grateful then. I thought I knew what that meant.

I see now that I could not have possibly.

Maybe my frontal lobe is developing or maybe I am just better able to see things now, but I feel gratitude like I never have before. I can stretch it between my fingers like a spider web and examine the intricate layers to everything I feel for life these days. I am still looking for a job and there are so many things I do not and cannot know, but it does not worry me. For when I look at my life, the one I have here and the one that lives on without me back in California, and I think of Sacks and the wisdom that came to him in his dying days, it is not employment or any one thing that I wish for as much as it is the ability to fully experience life.

My job will come. I can get a job.

But this feeling of loving and being loved, of waking up and seeing the world and feeling absurdly grateful for my time upon it, and of knowing, really knowing, that I am having the most enormous, extraordinary adventure with it all, is the thing I am most thankful for.

And I am, so thankful.

Love, m.

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