No theme weaves a grateful path

I have nothing to say—at least that is what I’m typing at this very moment. 

A wise editor once said to me, “Write about the most important thing first.”

I heed his wisdom.

I have nothing important to write about.

My excuses for said nothingness, pathetic at best, are piled up and stuck to each other like the anti-inflammatory medicine capsules I accidentally knocked into the kitchen sink, slick-wet from a wash of dinner dishes.

The gelatin skins, once independent and full of joint pain relief, conjoin and morph into an orangey-white sludge worse than melted creamsicles. 

I manage to save one or two pills and set them aside with intention. I then forget about them until weeks later when I find them covered in dust just like all the hours in the last week that I’d planned to set aside to write.

The next budding column’s theme eludes me.

Deep down in the heel of my winter boot, it is wedged underneath the orthotic insole, seated in glue slapped in there by an underpaid shoe factory laborer from a third world country, who was thinking about how many other jobs he could take on to make ends meet while building my footwear on a hot and sticky humid-thick Sunday afternoon, that also was his wife’s birthday.

Once again, I wait to the last possible hour to compile my thoughts and the last possible minute to write them down.

It’s a time when the people with true intention, who completed their goals well before deadline, have showered and crawled snugly into their electric blanket laden beds.

I pour over the chicken scratch notes on ideas for this column. Oh, the computer memory I have sacrificed for these ideas and yet nothing in them strikes me to task.

The clock ticks on and it’s cold outside.

After fidgeting like a six-year-old I drag my creative side kicking and screaming from inside myself, out through the ends of my fingers and reach for the last eight squares of fruit and nut infused chocolate sitting on my desk. It’s nearly 9 p.m. and eating chocolate at this hour is sure defeat of a good night’s rest.

And just as I was filling my diet quota with the last two morsels, I hear a voice on the radio say, “And how was your Blue Monday? Did you feel like the rest of us today? Did you feel like you’d hit rock bottom, cold, miserable, in debt, out of shape, and feeling like a loser because you’d flushed your willpower from the New Year down the loo?”

Suddenly I had my theme.

Cookies baking in the kitchen, tea with my dad, a swift winter’s sprint down the frozen creek in the sunshine of a Sunday afternoon, the soft light at my parents’ house down the way, a kiss for someone special whom I hadn’t seen in nearly a week, a laugh with a grandchild, a connection, a hearty meal, gratitude—lots of gratitude.

Sometimes I forget how good I have it.

Where I am with all that

Honestly this has been the best, most genuinely “soul filled with peace” holiday season I have had in years.

I didn’t mope about my past, I didn’t pick apart my present day, and I didn’t fret about my future. I quite simply was “right here, right now.”

I won’t be able to express within the confines of the English language how much acceptance is in my heart. And if I had feathered wings I would fly.

I have gunned for the bright side through counseling with gurus and reading self-help books, and writing positive affirmations to launch me forward. I’ve fallen short, pressed on, gained ground, lost a shoe, found it, lost my flashlight, and so on.

And then in a moment of grace in late November a simple yet profound conversation with a very special friend transformed me while driving on a highway in the middle of the afternoon. It changed me inside once and for all. It changed me forever. I know this to my core.

Most of all it transformed me out of dread of the holidays, which have for various reasons over the past four or five years been a dark and melancholy time.

I just knew in that moment on the long drive to where we were going that everything I’d been through had finally come to rest in a good and quiet place.

It was like I turned off a switch and turned on another and there was no need to go back in that room again.

This is not to say I won’t make new resolutions and then regret it after I eat more pizza than I should, or that I won’t kick myself in the shin for—after the pizza binge--consuming the last two chocolate bars left over in the cupboard from my holiday stash.

I will make my promise list for 2015 that will no doubt include getting more exercise, eating regularly and with health paramount, saving more money, and practicing anger management when I find another nesting hole in a box.

I will make good on my list and I will not. I’m teetering right now, having just eaten a second butter tart after I vowed to give the last three to my dad.

I will for sure make good on that squirrel, whose menacing carcass is still on the loose in my garage, having found its way into boxes of old dishes and, yes, into another sleeping bag I had missed when I raided the shelves of all manner of possible rodent attractions.

Who knew one sleeping bag held that much white fluffy insulation?

Who knew a squirrel could shred that stuff into such a high volume disaster, now strewn all over the garage floor when, in momentary madness I channeled my inner child tantrum and flung fuzz everywhere in another attempt to thwart my nemesis.

Hans Christian Anderson once penned, “Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”

I think I’m there.

I sure could use a live trap though.