Yesterday at work, I told Kathleen about a page in my journal titled “One Good Thing.” The title is in a circle, and rays go out from it, each one numbered one through thirty-one, for every day this month. It encourages me to find something, every single day, that made me feel good. It might be a phone call from a friend, a walk down the Hannigan Road with my dogs, or a package in the mail.
“Yesterday, the good thing was that I worked with you,” I told her. Then (for fear we should get too maudlin at work), I added (and we both laughed), “It was kind of a crap day…that was the best I could come up with.” It was a nice day working with her, though, and if I hadn’t been writing those things down, it might have gone unnoticed.I’m trying to be more mindful of the things that bring me pleasure. For many years, I did just the opposite.
As a creative person – a writer and a visual artist – and as someone who always likes to have one cause or another under her wing, I used to resent my middling, “white-bread” life. “It would be so much easier to be creative if I were Black…or at least Native American,” I would mourn (with obviously very little knowledge about what could actually make a life easier!). Why did I have to have to grow up in a family that was only barely poor and mildly dysfunctional? My marriage wasn’t good, but it wasn’t “Burning Bed” bad, either. Where was a creative person to get their material?
The other side of that issue is the desire to do creative work that is personal to me. I could – and sometimes do – embrace larger causes: world peace, hunger, poverty, women’s issues. If I stretch beyond my true knowledge and sincere interest, though, it not only feels false, it is insulting to the cause. I’d may as well be trying to paint landscapes that I have never seen, or write about civilizations that I know nothing about.
Reluctantly, I took my own ordinary life with its average experiences, and let my ideas flow from that uninspired base. I discovered that, with heart, the ordinary becomes special, and the common makes room for the common bond. And I learned to find satisfaction in creating from what I could glean from my own run-of-the-mill life.
Still, I tend toward melodrama. I lean toward pessimism. I expect unfavorable results; I dwell on worst-case scenarios. Though I have a million good things in my life, I’ve never been very good at gratitude. I’m trying to do better. On my daily pages, I put a little heart in the margin next to accomplishments that made me feel good (as apposed to just “accomplished”). And now I have my “One Good Thing” chart, which forces me, even on a bad day, to find something joyous.
That, alone, is one good thing!
Wonderful post, Cindy! You inspire me in so many ways. I love the way you make me recognize parts of myself that I’d never acknowledged before! Thank you for your words. Reading your blog is one of my “Good Things.”
Thanks so much for saying such kind things! I just got Elizabeth Berg’s book – based on your comments about it. Two chapters in, I love it! Thank you!