Gratitude: Day Ten.

This experiment is revealing some fascinating things, even just ten days in. 

There have been moments when I have resisted gratitude, which feels bizarrely weird. Surely it should be a joyful and straightforward process? What could be lovelier than paying thanks for all the good fortune in one human life? Apparently, the complicated psyche does not always think so. 

There have been days when I’ve found it hard to choose. 

There have been times when I have felt entirely bogus.

There have been fears of being obvious or boring or wrong.

All the contradictions and subterranean elements of the mind are, apparently, coming out to play.

But today the gratitude is utterly simple. It’s for friendship. It’s for the old, old friends with whom you can be your absolute and utter self. It’s for that moment when you can pick up the telephone and a beloved voice is there and even though you haven’t spoken for a while, you pick up right where you left off. You can stand in a Scottish field in the gloaming, with the receiver pressed against your ear and you can laugh and you can cry and you can question and you can affirm. My goodness, what a rare privilege that is. What balm for the singed spirits, what restoration for the soul, what a lift to the heart. 

The funny thing is that after this incredible, intense, beautiful conversation with someone I have known and loved for over thirty years, someone with whom I have shared history, someone who knows all my secrets and my quirks and my moments of flakiness and who has told me all hers in return, a much newer friend rang up.

We have only shared intimate thoughts and feelings for the last two years or so. You might think that nothing can replicate those old, profound relationships, and yet there is a kind of soul sister connection that does not seem to rely on time.

It’s a completely different thing, and yet it has all the same pleasures. It’s all about being known and accepted and admired, and knowing and accepting and admiring right back. It’s galloping about over twelve different subjects and shooting off on tangents and then coming back at the end and laughing over the ground we have covered.

So I got it all, today. It’s love, really, in every single one of its many guises. It’s a great, big, fat outpouring of love. And I think every human being needs that. So I am more grateful than I say, as the first full moon of the year rises over the land.

PS. The photograph is not a good photograph. I took it yesterday. The red mare and I were riding and the gloaming was coming in and there was not much light. Everything is slightly blurred, and you can’t quite see the full glory of that moon. But it shone down on me and my thoroughbred and it made me feel as if there was some kind of sign or hope or blessing. That moon is how I feel now, so I don’t mind that nobody is going to be writing home about my photography skills. I think you get the feeling from the blurry picture, and that’s all that matters.