By Anna Quindlen
It is amazing how much you can learn in one year. I went home in September, and my mother died in January. By April, I realized I had salvaged one thing out of the ruin of my life as I had known it: I was still alive, and I could actually take pleasure in the feeling of my lungs filling and emptying again. I looked at the daffodils and the azaleas, and the Lord, they were beautiful.
I looked around at all the kids who found life kind of a drag. And I knew I had undergone a sea change. Because I was never again going to be able to see life as anything except a gift.
Let's be honest. We have an embarrassment of riches. Life is good. And that's why we have an obligation to make it better. If each of us doesn't give something back, it makes a mockery of all we've been given.
It is easy to say to yourself, I cannot give a minute more. There aren't enough hours in the day. Whenever I feel that way, I remember a day I spent with a woman who worked twice a week at a neighbourhood soup kitchen. She had a busy husband and two kids to take care of along with a job, and I was standing at a sink watching her scrape carrots. And I said to her,"How can you find time to do this?"
She looked up at the line of men and women forming outside. And with scarcely a pause in her peeling, she answered,"How could I not?"
Live is divine. I don't mean in any cosmic way, but in all its small component parts: the feeling of one of my kid's hands in mine, the way my husband looks when he reads with the lamp behind him. Life is made of moments, small pieces of silver amid long stretches of gravel. It would be nice if they came unsummoned, but given our busy lives, that won't happen. We have to make time for them.
So I offer this challenge: Learn to be happy. Learn to look at all the good in the world and to give some of it back because you believe in it passionately.
Embrace the little things of life that sometimes get left in the dust of our frenetic schedules.
Gwendolyn Brooks wrote:
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
And be it gash or gold it will
not come again in this identical
disguise.
Sometimes we lose that wonder. And sometimes we regain it through hard lessons, the way I did. Because the year my mother died, I learned something enduring about life: that it is glorious, and we have no business taking it for granted.
If I have to give a reason for posting this article, it was possibly because I'm gradually losing hope and motivation in my life. I was looking through my old books and I came across this article. I had not posted the entire article, but while reading it, I remembered what my mother told me - that she does not want to die at this moment because she was very thankful that we are with her at this point of time. I made a promise to my dad that I would leave this house before I turn 30. And I always thought it was okay for me to die anytime now - i have no liability to take care of. But after hearing her words: will it be okay, really, for me to die like that? More or less, her gratitude spelled the answer I needed, and I want to savour every moment we have together - even if it means having conflicts for the rest of our time together.
*soup kitchen : a place where they offer food to the needy at no cost (or little charge).
