Gratitude and the Void

My plan was to test out this new plugin with a post this afternoon – er, yesterday afternoon, as it’s now 13 minutes into tomorrow.  But I didn’t get a chance to.  Work was crazy busy today and I left feeling like I still have a million things to do.  Which isn’t true:  I only have a handful and the projects I’m working on are (so far) well in hand (pun).

When I jumped over to Lauren Flax’s blog via my Outlook feed this afternoon, I scrolled down to leave a comment and saw that I already had – but it was a comment I left on her facebook page.  I was all like “wtf?  How tf did that happen?”  (I say f a lot – in my head.)  So I went to Lauren’s facebook page (yeah, we’re cool like that) and clicked on her latest post.  It brought me right to her blog.  If you click on the link to one of my posts – via my fb page (“Notes”) or via The Quixotic Jedi Fan Page – you get either the “Note” version of one of these here blog posts, or you get kind of a window on this here actual page, basically enveloped by the Networked Blogs facebook page.  So people (that’s you, dear reader) read my posts on facebook, but not HERE.  WTFrig.  So I installed the Wordbooker plugin (just like Lauren).  Total fb-integration (if I want).

So yeah, we’re (that’s you & me, dear reader) taking this pig out for a test-drive.  Let me know what happens or if anything goes wrong or seems annoying – such as double-posting on fb.  Your fb-comments will (read: should, if I set the damned thing up right) migrate over here, and vice-versa.

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I was talking to my buddy Mike this evening – he turned 63 last Monday – about gratitude.  About how that feeling of gratitude is something that can be practiced.  What I mean is that it’s like meditation:  finding the void is hard at first – it’s slippery and seems impossible to hold onto.  Until, of course, I let go.

After enough practice, I can slide into that void pretty much any time I like.  The world can be chaos around me – and I can be all kinds of caught up in that chaos – but (if I remember to do it) I can let go of it all and find the void – that calm in the storm.

Gratitude is the same way.  Even when I’m feeling like a total piece of sh*t, self-pity verily oozing out of every pore, if I remember to be grateful (even for something small), I can get right back to that overall feeling of gratitude.  Like the void, I become a channel again, instead of a vessel.

At this point in our discussion, Mike got a bit animated and said “yeah, it’s just like remembering what it was like to be in love all over again.”  And I was like “sh*t”.  Only I said it with the ‘i’ in the middle (no pun).

I don’t remember what it feels like to be in love.  I can remember that I was in love, but I can’t replicate the feeling.  Maybe ‘replicate’ is the wrong word.  It’s more like I can’t empathize with myself.  Or, rather, my former self.

Oh, I can remember (sort of) the time in my life when I was in love – and I define being “in love” as a two-way street:  it doesn’t work one way – that’s more of an infatuation thing.  But I can’t remember what it feels like.  I remember feeling grounded – that as long as I had that love, anything could go wrong and I’d be ok.  I suppose I felt ‘complete’, but again, I’m not sure that’s the right word.

It’s like I’m forced to play the tape all the way through:  that beginning period of hanging out with my (ex-)wife which morphed into courtship, and then the time after the “I-dos” – all of it flows inexorably into the heartbreak and heartache of the end.

Don’t get me wrong here, dear reader:  I’m not crying on my keyboard right now or anything.  I suppose the flip side of the “holy sh*t, call the wa-aaaambulance – I can’t remember what it feels like to be in love” coin is that neither can I feel that most vicious and ubiquitous of pains I felt at the end.

Verily, I could probably go digging around in my mind/soul/whatever for a fingerful of that ambrosia that love was, but then I’d also be left with the tainted aftertaste.  I’ll pass, thankyouverymuch.

All that said, I feel pretty complete right now.  (Knock on wood) I’m pretty sure that if anything goes wrong, I’ll be ok.  Being able to find gratitude (if I can remember to do it) is part of that, and it’s pretty sweet.

Tagged as: gratitude, love, the void