A PublicAtion of the toDo institute l Volume 17 number 1

Constraints Create the Possibility of Joy SUSAN SCHNUR

I had a spine disease in my late teens and early 20’s, and I suppose you could say it pruned me back. No one particularly knew about my pain but me and

the boyfriend who slept next to my body cast. At night, because of the pain, I cried myself to sleep with a feeling that was like searching for a small window along a vast wall; eventually, through the night, I would find that

window and crawl through onto what felt like a narrow shelf: sleep.

After I was well again, I still woke in the middle of every night; I was used to it. At first it was habit that woke me. I expected pain and, finding it gone, I’d fall back to sleep, relieved. In time, though, it became the relief itself that woke me; a gratitude so sharp it felt almost physical.

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hirty Thousand DaysT A J o u r n A l f o r P u r P o s e f u l l i V i n g

Attention

self-reflection

Morita therapy

Purposeful Action

naikan

challenging children

living fully with illness

gratitude

12 • holiday 2011 T h i r T y T h o u s a n d d a y s

It’s hard to say how relief about something specific evolves into gratitude as a general stance toward life, but that’s what often happens, and that’s what happened with me.

I wake, and have for years now, overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude; it’s like a sixth sense, like waking to the smell of smoke in a house or to the sound of a child’s cry. It’s a reckless feeling, unbidden as tears. Nothing specific is its object, though there are big things, of course, to be grateful for: family, work, health, the security of a lawful country. And there are little ones: the sound of an orchestra warming up, flowers that pop up where they were never planted, the vertical line in the center of the Holland Tunnel that says, ‘’New Jersey/ New York.’’ These things - in their prodigality - move me.

I lie in bed sometimes, not with the urge to pray (that I rarely have), but with the feeling that I am a prayer.

Gratitude, it seems after all, is the scar left me by my illness; I wake to run my fingers along its seam.

Once, many years ago, sleeping on the sofa bed in the living room of my boyfriend’s parents’ house in Teaneck, N.J., I witnessed a performance of gratitude the likes of which I have never seen elsewhere.

It was the middle of the night - I was up with my own back pain - when the light flashed on in the upstairs hall and Jon’s father came padding down into the room. Oblivious of me, he went into the kitchen, cut himself a slab of rye bread with a butcher knife, then stood with it in the dining room under the street shadows.

‘’Chleb,’’ he said finally, thrusting the bread into the air. ‘’Broit’’ - he held the bread against his pajama pocket. ‘’Pane’’ - he shook it. ‘’Lechem’’ - kissed it. ‘’Bread’’ - took a bite.

This he did over and over, saying the word in more languages than I could imagine existed -thrusting, hug-ging, shaking, kissing, biting, exclaiming - until he stood in the room empty-fisted. Then he burped roomily and went back up the stairs to bed.

I think of that night a lot, especially when I am up myself at 3 A.M. It seems almost premonitory. I think: What did I know about this man? That he loved his wife, yes. His children. That he checked on his kids too often in their rooms; changed the oil in his car every thousand miles; kept unnecessary dry goods in his basement. His family used to laugh at him. He seemed sometimes, on an ordinary morning, almost stunned by the fierceness of his happiness. He was, it now seems clear to me, exhausted by his blessings;

in a sense, afraid of them. He was a Holocaust survivor, Jonny’s dad. The contrast

woke him in the night. When I was a kid, I laughed at someone, too - at two

people, actually - my grandmothers. My childhood was one of grinding wealth. (Once, on a radio call-in show seeking the best answer to the question ‘’What would you like to be reincarnated as?’’ a friend of mine won a prize by stating my reality: ‘’The only daughter of a Jewish radiologist.’’) But my grandmothers - we lived with one of them - were Spartan and severe.

Nana used to follow us up to our rooms after dinner with a handful of whatever she had seined from the garbage pail: a carrot top, a little heel of hotdog, apple peel with white on the inside.

She would hold it under the Tensor lamp where my geometry homework was spread out, cut an eighth of an inch of carrot top off against her flesh, then flip the orange-brown coin into her mouth. ‘’An avairah,’’ she’d say. ‘’It’s a sin to waste.’’ This performance she would repeat in each of my brothers’ rooms; then she’d retire to her own room for the night. My other grandmother would not accept gifts. ‘’I have everything,’’ she had taken to saying, probably while still starving in Russia under the Czar. If you gave her a book, she gave it back. ‘’I already have a book,’’ she’d say.

But as I think back on these two women from the van-tage of my own adulthood, this is what I know: That there was nothing they wanted on this planet that they didn’t already have and nothing that they had they didn’t want.

Three years ago, when I came home from the hospital with my son, 6 days old, I found that I couldn’t enter my house but stood on the front porch, weeping. My husband

tried to pull me in. ‘’I can’t,’’ I said. ‘’Everything I love is in there.’’ I imagined everything: rugs, lamps, records, books, my seedlings under lights, my Lanz of Salzburg nightgowns, my hiking boots, our photographs. And I imagined my husband, the greatest blessing of all. I realized then that

Constraints Create the Possibility of Joy Continued from Page 1

there was nothing they wanted on this planet that they didn’t already have and nothing that

they had they didn’t want.

T h i r T y T h o u s a n d d a y s holiday 2011 • 13

my notion of life was that it was a kind of haiku: One is given one’s handful of syllables, and it is beside the point (and bad luck) to take more.

Success turns not on more at all but on nuances, gestures, on the crystallization of every breath.

It seemed, almost, as I stood there by the door, that I should take something out - my piano, my desk, even the furnace, absurd as that seems - to make room for this boy; to create a hollow for this new little syllable. Constraints, after all, create the possibility of joy. That is the whole point; constraints are there to plunder and get drunk on.

Tonight I get home late, and Lincoln, my son, and Lenny, my husband, are asleep in the bed together. Lincoln sleeps with his buttocks in the air. Lenny is head-to-head, some-how, with a plastic hammer. There are three dinosaurs at the foot of the bed. There is a Sugar Pop on the pillowcase.

Lenny’s book, ‘’An Almanac for Moderns,’’ is wedged between the mattress and the headboard. Lincoln holds a wooden pestle in his hand.

Sometimes, it seems, there is no end to this word: sacred. It wells up and encompasses everything: sticks, stones, sleep. I would like to build a little shrine around this scene, to conduct a little service. Suddenly, Lincoln is awake, the little syllable himself, a dirty pearl button, chirping as if it were the middle of an afternoon. ‘’My friend Andrew has a chalkboard,’’ he says. ‘’And I am he-man. Let me show you.’’

Susan Schnur has been Senior Editor at Lilith Magazine for 25 years. This essay is reprinted from a series of weekly columns she wrote for The New York Times in 1985. A clinical psychologist and recovering rabbi, she has a clinical practice in Boston and Dedham, MA. This essay is reprinted with permission of the author.

Be Vocal in Times of BeautyS ometimes I think of all the

nice things I’ve thought about other people and

never shared -- of the unacknowl-edged gifts I’ve received from the world, and the vast clutter of unuttered statements of gratitude and appreciation. A gentle stain of regret tinges the thought of all those unspoken words, un-acted-upon intentions, stacked up like unpaid bills somewhere in the recesses of my experience. “Be Vocal In Times Of Beauty” -- I don’t fully recall where I first came across that phrase. But I remembered it recently as I was standing near the register at a café where we were holding an event.

I heard a customer tell the woman at the counter, “I just want to say, it makes such a difference to come in here and find you looking so happy to be doing what you’re doing. It makes us want to come back again, it really does.”

It struck me that here was someone being vocal in a time of beauty. There was a power to the moment that galvanized action. We had a bowl of smile stones inside the café that were meant for the guests at the event. I grabbed a blue one with a particularly wide smile. The customer who made the comment was putting cream in her coffee. I walked up to her, holding out a smile card and the little stone. “I want to give you these,” I said. Her face lit up in amazement, “ How did you know I needed a smile?” She looked down again at the little blue stone smiling up at her. “Thank You,” she said, giving me a hug. I smiled and went back to the café to attend to the rest of the event.

Five minutes later the same woman walked in, there were bright tears in her eyes as she leaned over to hold my hand and whisper to me, “You really have

no idea how much that meant. My mother and I are here from Hawaii to be with my uncle. He’s in the hospital after a triple bypass surgery. We’ve been here four days and it’s been really hard. And then you came by with this smile at just the right time. God bless you! Aloha.” And with another swift hug she was gone, throwing a grateful glance over her shoulder as she left.

It dawned on me a little later that my gesture was not so much one of generosity but one of grati-tude. She was in essence thanking me for thanking her. Funny how sometimes what goes around comes around more swiftly than we might imagine. But all I really want to remember from this story is . . . Be Vocal In Times Of Beauty.

by Pavi Mehta, author of Infinite Vision

http://www.infinitevisionaries.com originially published on www.helpothers.org