Sunday morning I woke to the sound of Mary Chapin Carpenter reading her NPR This I Believe essay titled The Learning Curve of Gratitude.
The day before a friend had sung her favorite Chapin Carpenter song in a clear but breathless voice ravaged by asthma and chronic pulmonary disease. My friend struggles with a host of chronic illnesses and in recent months caring for her husband post cardiac surgery. She is tired of being ill. Her children have grown weary of her always being ill and are serving up indifference, guilt, and conditions for their love. She is between a rock and a hard place and sees no glimmer of change in the foreseeable future. A granddaughter stopped by to confront her about the growing rift in the family, wanting to know what she was doing about it, and she replied "I pray". She tried to answer her granddaughter's next question, "So what does that do?" as honestly and sincerely as possible, but moved on to another topic when the granddaughter scoffed "well you can get that from yoga". I smiled at the image of my very Catholic, frail friend bowed by the ravages of rheumatoid arthritis, twisted into a yoga pretzel pose.
After her granddaughter left, we sat in her garden and she talked of her determination to live each day with grace and gratitude. Mary Chapin Carpenter summed up what that means quite well in her essay when she wrote:
"What I want more than ever is to appreciate that I have this day, and tomorrow and hopefully days beyond that. I am experiencing the learning curve of gratitude.
I don't want to say "have a nice day" like a robot. I don't want to get mad at the elderly driver in front of me. I don't want to go crazy when my Internet access is messed up. I don't want to be jealous of someone else's success. You could say that this litany of sins indicates that I don't want to be human. The learning curve of gratitude, however, is showing me exactly how human I am."
Chapin Carpenter's complete essay can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11182405. Striving to be content to live simply with gratitude is not an easy thing, especially now when we are trained from birth to want more and more and more, to expect to always "have it our way", and to feel cheated or defeated when life doesn't turn out as we planned. Eventually most of us will have to struggle with the learning curve of gratitude.
I look forward Mary Chapin Carpenter's next album. Her songs have always been rooted in life. The songs she writes now will be born from her struggle to reach a state of gratitude and they will resonate with those of us who also search for peace and gratitude along roads we never dreamed life would take us.
