The Edges of the Day

Reflections on disappointment and gratitude.

I finished a beautiful essay on gratitude just now, and then I hit the wrong key and the damn thing disappeared. It’s probably for the best. Beautiful prose does not make great writing. In fact, it often stands in the way of it. I’ve been told, and I believe, that when a writer finishes a piece, their first edit should be to find the one line they’re most proud of and strike it through. It’s almost always overwritten and untrue.

When I first sat down to write, I had a candle burning on my desk and my window waxing pink with dawn, and outside it, the pond. I’ve always loved the edges of the day. Especially the lingering edges of these lengthening days as winter yields. On such a morning, with such a dawn, and my desk in a pool of candlelight, it was easy to conjure and write about a feeling of genuine gratitude. Then it was gone. Now on this second pass, the bright sunlight is coming through and burning off the enchantment. And the eagle has come down to the pond and flown off with a drake and the remaining duck is paddling in circles calling for her missing mate. The candle has dimmed but burns on. Sometimes it seems as though winter yields to a spring of despair, of blooming disappointments and doubts that I’d rather not see. Where, oh where has my gratitude gone? Up in the air with the eagle perhaps or fled west across the mountains with the dawn.

A friend gifted me a little notebook with “daily disappointments” printed on the cover. I have it here on my desk. My first instinct (after joking that it wasn’t big enough to hold them all) was to strike out “disappointments” and write “gratitudes” instead. But this initial reflex was a cover. It was an attempt to avoid looking at something uncomfortable. Yes, keeping a list of things I’m grateful for is good. It engenders a sense of well-being and fulfillment, both worthy and necessary. But contrary to the witty slogans on internet memes and the bromides printed in many meditation books, gratitude cannot be the entire spectrum of human emotion any more than the glow of a candle or a beautiful sunrise can be the entire spectrum of light. And because I’m nostalgic by nature (an asset rather than a defect in my view), I must always be on guard for when my writing drifts into sentimentalism.

Someone asked Jack Kerouac once what was more important in a writer, good ideas or good prose. He laughed and answered that it was prose, as a prose poet would, but I think that’s only partially true. Yes, ideas are plentiful, and the genius is often in their execution. But I’ve read plenty of great prose without any heart in it, and I’ve read prose that crosses into sentimentality, becoming little more than a well-crafted tune whistled in the dark. It’s not ideas or prose that are essential, it’s truth. Writing transcends when it touches an unhealed wound in the writer so deeply that the reader feels it too. In a sea of pop platitudes, ever so rarely, someone like Leonard Cohen comes along and bangs his head on a hotel floor and a cold and broken Hallelujah rings through. The fruit of these beautiful truths may very well be healing and gratitude, but they are not born of gratitude. They cannot be. Even in the oldest of our texts, the spring resurrection is meaningful because of the death that precedes it.

I decided at four this morning to write about gratitude. Our elderly Maine Coon had climbed onto my chest and nuzzled my cheek, waking me for her morning pet. She does this every morning between four and five, and sometimes at night too. I think she has nightmares where she is back in that cold garage littered with broken glass, suffering alone with maggot-infested wounds she cannot even groom because of obesity from a diet of dog food. She was set to escape this hell on the euthanasia table when an angelic veterinarian saw something worth saving in her terrified eyes. Yet somehow in the face of this unspeakable mistreatment, our Isabella maintained her sweetness, and when she wakes afraid, I wake with her and give her what small comfort I can. I do this without fail, no matter what time, no matter how tired I am. I do it because I love her. I do it because she’s old and I know the greatest of all disappointments is someday coming: the morning when I’m allowed to sleep in, the morning after which I’ll feel her nuzzle my cheek only evermore in dreams.

So, I woke up filled with gratitude. Gratitude for Isabella and the vet who saved her. I woke up feeling sentimental. But that’s only half of the truth. If I dig a little deeper and think about her prior abuse, I find anger and rage and an existential disappointment in humanity that makes me wish that God would tip the world like a dinner plate and send us all tumbling into outer space like so many useless crumbs into the trash. And that’s okay. There’s beauty in that. There’s truth. And if I look long enough and honestly enough into that abyss, and resist sentimentality, the eyes adjust and eventually search out a tiny spark with which to kindle a deeper gratitude.

I’ll always be somewhat sentimental. I’ll probably trim the wick of truth and burn my candle in the failing light this very evening. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I’m glad that my first pass at writing on gratitude this morning disappeared, letting the light come and reveal something truer. I’m striking “gratitudes” from my daily notebook and rewriting “disappointments” instead. I certainly have a great deal to be grateful for. Probably much more than most. But as blessed as any of us may be, we’re human, and we’re entitled to have a few disappointments too.

An audio recording of this essay can be found here:

Audio: The Edges of the Day