Maybe you could tell me a story tonight, about giving thanks all month long.  Have you noticed how many kind people are in your life?  Have you felt like showing them what their gift means to you?

My sleepy eyes are getting in the way of writing.   So maybe I will tell you more of a story tomorrow.  But I promised to try extra special hard to make you something beautiful today.  I hope you like it.  Every word is true.

It goes without saying that I try to make something beautiful to share with you
more or less all week long.
Something beautiful from the ordinary things I do and see, because I think you
might notice them, too.
It deserves to be said, if you didn’t know
how lucky I feel to know you will be here.
Makes me feel like giving you something beautiful to say
“Thank you.”
I will try extra special hard tomorrow, but for today
reading by lace light
is what I can offer.

What if, when I said “Thank you,” you weren’t willing to let it in?

Maybe it was my mistake.  Those moments of connection seem to come along once in a blue moon.  I can practice on myself, but I can’t force anyone else to join in.

I guess if you admit what you already gave was enough, there is a risk I might not need you anymore.  (I might even be talking about myself here – what do you think?)

Sometimes,  when I say “No,” that is a form of “Thank you.”  I am willing to trust you enough not to go along, just to keep things as they are.

The reality is, I can stop the car, marvel at the sky, and make whatever picture I see, or I can hide a little bit longer.  Either way, the moment passes.  The light escapes.  That’s what light does.

Maybe “change” is the sincerest “Thank you” of all.

“People with depression…need a great deal from others, but we are embarrassed and confused by our needs so we don’t articulate them well…instead keeping secret wishes locked in our hearts…We depressives have trouble giving up the idea that there is a secret to happiness that others know and we don’t, that others could make us happy if they loved us enough, but out of perversity choose not to.”  Undoing Depression, Richard O’Connor, Ph. D

As long as I can remember I have lived with the feeling that I simultaneously needed too much from others, and shouldn’t need anything at all.  Talk about a dog chasing its tail!  (Yeah, you should definitely look that up on youtube next time you need to stop your mind.)  Cutting yourself off from acknowledging your real needs, if only to yourself, is no way to live.  That’s why depression feels so bad.  Needing and receiving become threatening when you stuff them both into Pandoras Box.

“Gratitude …is a feeling or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received or will receive,” according to Wikipedia contributors.     It sounds simple.  Acknowledge the tenderness of your (perhaps unspoken) need to another who has (perhaps unwittingly) supplied your want. Here is the elegant reciprocity that makes life feel good – acknowledgement creates a bond between giver and receiver which nourishes both.  Experiencing gratitude, however, presents an especially poignant difficulty for someone in my situation.   The deeper, the more basic the want, the trickier it is for me to admit to anyone, at all.

At the bottom of Pandoras Box, though, I think I have discovered a trap door.  It is labelled “grace.”  The magic words that unlock this door are “free”  and “unmerited.”  Grace is closely intertwined with mercy and forgiveness, and honors the reality that you don’t earn everything you receive in life.  To my mind, grace levels the playing field where we all hash out the insecurities of fear and indebtedness.  “You’re gonna need a few things,”  Grace says.  “Everyone does.  Do your best with what’s here for you already, and then let’s see what you’ve got to give.”

Is walking an expression of gratitude, in and of itself?  It is certainly a dialogue of trust, between the most ancient manifestation of our human identity and the grassy sweeps of East African savannahs.  It turns out those of us who could travel on just 2 feet got a little more of everything a species needs to keep going – food, shelter, babies.   Ambulating away from the trees was risky, but staying put was risky too.  Two million years later, walking upright looks like a sound evolutionary investment.  It made Homo Sapiens a success.

You can walk for fitness all you want, but for me that is “a good walk, spoiled.”  Monitoring my heart rate while calculating fuel combustion only served to spread the infection of guilty failure to yet another activity.  The pleasure of walking without a timeline, striding along to my body’s native, unhurried pace, recently rehabilitated a more critically wounded facet of my health.  Daily walks rescued me from deep anger.  I don’t believe it was as simple as walking off the physical side of my emotions, though I am sure anyone who heard my furious mutterings on some of those walks might disagree.  Maybe my emotions can’t tell the difference between pounding the pavement, and pounding a nemesis.   I think walking gave my anger something to do – literally, a way to move on.

To get away from myself, I do not have to go very far.  From my door to Silent Street, where the library, goose pond, prairie and funeral home each stake out a corner, takes just 12 minutes.  On the way, I always find the unexpected:  a plastic skeleton dangling from a tree, fallen apples crowded in the gutter, maple leaves the size of manhole covers (well, almost.)  The price of admission to this spectacle is admitting that I need it.  I need to keep moving, and (here’s the gratitude part) I need to relish moving on my own terms, while I still can.  Walking confirms my right to be here.  It is an expression of selfhood as basic as any hunger.  It proves the machinery I need to balance is intact, whether I stroll or stumble.  When I walk, I give the sun a chance to shine on me, one step at a time.