`A Quotidian Enactment'

Call it a spiritual exercise, common sense or enlightened self-interest, but a formal expression of gratitude always attracts my attention and reminds me to count my undeserved blessings. I don’t mean the self-congratulatory effusions of Oscar winners. Rather, consider this excerpt from Friday’s post by William F. Vallicella at Maverick Philosopher:

“A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one’s life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.”

Mind you, this comes from a bona fide philosopher. Vallicella posted his reminder the same day my 12-year-old Pontiac broke down. Instead of whining about it, I tried to remember to be grateful that I even own a car, that I can afford the repairs and the cost of a rental. Self-pity tugs like a black hole. Vallicella concludes, “A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing should do wonders for you,” and it did. He reminded me of similar sentiments expressed almost four years ago in The Spectator by Theodore Dalrymple. Thanks to his essay, “Reasons to be cheerful,” I have adopted the following paragraph as my rather lengthy mantra, an invocation of gratitude:

“Thanks to the fact that I write, my life is satisfactory: I can inhabit gloom and live in joy. When something unpleasant happens to me, provided only that is potentially of literary use, my first thought is ‘How best can I describe this?’ I thereby distance myself from my own displeasure or irritation. As I tell my patients, much to their surprise — for it is not a fashionable view — it is far more important to be able to lose yourself than to find yourself.”

And this characteristic Dalrymple sentence -- “So long as the world is inexhaustibly interesting, we have reason to be cheerful” – which prompts me to catalog the following interesting gifts I have lately received:

A reader sent me a video of Koko Taylor singing “Wang Dang Doodle” accompanied by Little Walter. Editors have shipped me three books to review. Every morning, hot, black, fragrant coffee awaits me in the kitchen. The campus where I work is dense with oaks and squirrels. My three sons are healthy and reasonably happy. I’m reading George Herbert and R.S. Thomas again – inexhaustible pleasures (I almost wrote “treasures”). When I walk to the street each morning to fetch the newspapers, toads and lizards skitter out of my way in the dark. Thanks to a radio announcer I heard Monday morning while driving to work in my rented Ford, I’ve been listening to As Steals the Morn…, a collection of Handel’s arias and scenes for tenor sung by Mark Padmore, with the English Concert. On the title piece, from L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, Padmore is joined by soprano Lucy Crowe in singing words adapted from John Milton. The performance bring tears to your eyes:

“As steals the morn upon the night.
And melts the shades away:
So truth does Fancy’s charm dissolve,
And rising reason put to flight
The fumes that did the mind involve,
Restoring intellectual day.”