Tag: appreciation

“This Is the Best Day of My Life”

Sometimes bits of life wisdom show up in quite unusual places. I’m not really a fan of so-called “reality” TV shows, but I have to admit that I have always found “Amazing Race” to be compelling to watch. Pairs racing around the world, doing various complicated and strenuous activities and tasks, competing to win $1 million. If nothing else, it’s a study of human behavior under stress. And also, most interesting to me, some very clear illustrations of how people live their lives: driven by a compulsion to always “win” at any cost or filled with the joy of experience itself. This season two young gay men illustrated the latter in a beautiful way. They are best friends, gamers, who love to play Dungeons and Dragons, so when, during a segment in Portugal, one was asked to don knight’s armor as part of his task, he exclaimed with absolute beaming delight: “This is the best day of my life!” So much happiness in just playing. I loved it.

Meanwhile, another contestant constantly complained in anger and disgust whenever he and his wife were not in first place along the way. He seemed extremely unhappy a lot of the time. A life lesson there, in those two responses. True, it’s a contrived “game” in which people are in competition to win an excessive amount of money, but the reactions of the two participants, each so different, gave me pause. I realized anew that I want to live life in celebration and not complaint.

It’s not difficult to find things to complain about these days, whether it’s increasing political conflict, physical or emotional pain, or any one of a number of life difficulties. I know that I have complained about many of them. Yet I don’t want to live my life that way. In my heart and soul, I know that life is a blessing, and there is so much to be thankful for. I need reminders at times, though, and this particular show was one—loud and clear. I thought immediately of Anne’s and my wedding day (June 2014 at Auburn Lake), where friends and family from across the country gathered in love to celebrate with us. At the end of the day, I said to Anne, “Today is the happiest day of my life.” She agreed with all her heart.

It doesn’t have to be a wedding or a TV show to remind you to see the miracles in every moment, no matter what else is going on in the world. God finds all kinds of ways to wake us up at the most unexpected times and center us in appreciation. A passing comment or an act of kindness from a friend or stranger; an out-of-the-ordinary event that moves you to tears of gratitude. For me, it’s often the sights and sounds of Nature, especially birds. There’s always room for more heart expansion, love, and compassion, if we can only remain open and accepting of all of life, however it appears. Every subtle or obvious reminder is a gift. My greatest wish now is to begin each morning remembering: “This is the best day of my life!”

Find Something to Celebrate

Every morning, I look for something to celebrate. Something that makes me smile or laugh. Something that fills my heart with gratitude. At times, it can seem unlikely when each day’s news headlines bring something to feel fear or sadness about. Yet there is much more to life than those unsettling news stories.* I’ve discovered that my path to inner peace and optimism lies in looking for something positive to focus on. Something to celebrate in the world, rather than shed tears. It could be my partner’s sweet smiling face; her beautiful artwork. A neighbor’s kindness or a friend’s sense of humor. A Mary Oliver poem. Jon Batiste at the piano. Often it’s in Nature where I discover the inspiration to continue believing life is good.

One day last week my celebration was a flock of robins eating ripe red berries from winterberry trees as I walked by. Hearing them excitedly calling and flying all over in the cold winter air was such a thrill! I love robins—their rosy breasts and bright eyes. When I was growing up in the Midwest, we always thought of them as harbingers of spring, and they still hold that energy for me here in New England. New beginnings, sunshine, birdsong.

Yesterday I heard the warm-up notes of a male cardinal’s spring song. Every year in January or February those first “rehearsal” notes are heard here in Massachusetts. It’s not a rise in temperatures that triggers their song; it’s seasonal timing, the shift into a little more light each day. Gradually, spring is coming, and all the birds sense it. They too celebrate the “return of the light,” as humans do at the solstice.

Bird or human, the light connects us to life, to the positive overview. When I look out the window and see the morning sun sparkling on the trees (whether snowy or spring green), I feel the magic of the unexpected beauty that Nature brings us again and again. Every season moves us through our lives with new and exciting moments of wonder. Even if somewhere in the world there is harshness or hatred, here there is softness and love.

I never tire of the dynamic energy of winter transitioning to spring. It always gives me hope that whatever may be weighing on me can be lifted instantaneously with singing birds and blooming flowers, longer hours of sunshine and warmer temperatures. Winter holds us gently in hibernation and rest; then spring opens the door to the light, and our bodies and spirits move with renewed energy in the world again.

 When you smile with delight seeing bright yellow daffodils or hearing a wood thrush’s ethereal song, your smile may then touch the heart of the next person you meet…perhaps then continuing onward, person to person. In this way smiles can circle the globe, hearts opening along the way. Celebration can be as simple as that, and it changes everything. In your day and in your life. So wherever you find something to celebrate, in the wonders of Nature or the eyes of a loved one, hold that feeling of joy and appreciation in your heart, and it will switch on the light within you and in the world.
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*Read about everyday people living their lives for a gentler, more peaceful Earth at “Good News Headlines,” https://www.spiritofchange.org/.

Life Partners, Life Friendships

My friends Savanna and Katie were together nearly 50 years, until Savanna’s recent passing this summer. One of their daughters created a touching video photo montage of their life together, complete with perfectly chosen music. As I watched it, with alternating tears and smiles, I could feel the depth of their love and the ongoing joy of the life they shared. Such a sweet blessing—for them and for all who knew them. It made me think of so many other friends with decades-long marriages or partnerships. Gay, straight, bi, trans—all relationships based in caring, devotion, laughter, joy, tears, and a mutual appreciation for one another. Anne and I have been together 41 years ourselves. The longer I live, the more I feel the preciousness of these lifelong connections, interlaced with shared memories and experiences.

And this applies to friendships as well. I have friends I’ve known since grade school, high school, college, and work, each of them unique and irreplaceable. In the 1970s, I lived in a household with four other women that holds a special place in my heart. We were feminists active in the Boston women’s movement, several of us in a women’s literature graduate program at Goddard-Cambridge. Out of that came the humorous name we called ourselves: Cranford, based on a 19th century novel by Elizabeth Gaskell about a community of women who lived together without husbands. We shared our lives and all the exciting changes at that time: women’s music, presses, magazines, sports teams, activist groups. We latter-day Cranford sisters have remained friends ever since, the five of us (with our partners) meeting via Zoom recently, in San Francisco, Boston, and Western Massachusetts, coming together across time and space to reconnect with love.

Whether partner or friend, those in our lives mean everything to us. These are the souls we’ve chosen, prebirth, to travel through this life with. There are no coincidences in these arrangements. We came here to be together for however long we’re meant to be, sharing exactly what we’re meant to share. Learning and growing together and separately. That’s why we often feel like we’ve known someone before when we first meet them. Souls can travel together through lifetimes, playing different roles, experiencing different life lessons. Perhaps all of life is one reunion after another within a giant tapestry of being and soul expansion.

Every Christmas Eve, I talk on the phone long-distance with my friend Barb, whom I’ve known since we were 11. Our families spent Christmas Eve together throughout our childhood and adolescent years in Illinois. The golden nugget of those memories has stayed with us all our lives, through moving to different coasts, after the deaths of each of our parents, throughout changes, differences, and similarities. Each December 24, all of it comes together in one phone call in which we remember all the years of knowing and loving each other. We laugh and shed tears, and we renew our connection.

I treasure that phone call and our friendship, just as I treasure each one of my friends and especially dear Anne who has been by my side more than half my life. There is nothing like a life partner or a life friendship. It is one of the greatest gifts life on Earth brings us. May I always hold that deep appreciation and gratitude in my heart.

God Rides the Subway

People in the Western world have been taught that God, or Spirit, is something accessed primarily in a temple, church, or other sacred space. Even though we have heard the phrase “God lives within” most of our lives, we still carry an underlying belief that God is in the heavens or some other dimension. Many are questioning that view today and, from their own personal experiences, find Spirit not only inside but everywhere else. Not having been raised in any particular religion, I found it relatively easy to embrace this latter view when I embarked on spiritual exploration as an adult. Now, when I pause and take a deep breath, I feel that Presence in everyone and everything I see—and such gratitude for the connection.

For instance, yesterday I took the bus and subway into Boston for an eye doctor appointment. I live outside the city so the noise, crowds, and busyness can take some getting used to (even though I worked there for many years before retiring). I had to mentally stop and breathe and then shift my inner gaze in order to center myself in the open awareness that is so much a part of me now. In doing so, as always, God was everywhere I looked.

The homeless people clustered by the library were God, as were the nearby construction workers and the college students rushing by deep in conversation. The mockingbird enthusiastically serenading in the tree I passed was God, along with the pansies on the ground below. God was the slightly inebriated man at the subway stop loudly singing: “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.” As was the wild-haired man in faded but colorful running shorts and tank top dancing down the center aisle of the subway car.

And God was the crossing guard riding home on the bus, talking to the driver about her wife and how much she loved her work. Both of them shared stories about job loss and unpaid bills during COVID, as well as gratitude for their lives now. I stood quietly listening near them on the crowded bus and also felt gratitude, glad that such a friendly, inclusive conversation could take place in public in the state where I live. God-ness seemed to fill the entire bus and all the diverse people on it.

Such are the moments that pass quickly through our days, and we may miss them if we don’t pay full attention. It is easy to do—to tune out what seems like noise and shut down to the living spirit all around. I often did it when I commuted to work in Boston daily. Yet now, in recent years, as I grow older and I realize more fully the precious unrepeatability of each person and each moment, I find it easier to pause and remember.

Even if you don’t believe in what has been named “God” or “Spirit,” try opening your eyes and heart wider to the vast variety of the world around you—whatever you see from that space will fill your life with wonder and profound appreciation. The spirit of life is everywhere, even the city subway, and it’s all part of the greater oneness of the universe.

Accentuate the Positive, My Mother’s Gift

Photograph © 2018 Peggy Kornegger
A song written and recorded in 1944 that was popular with my parents’ generation had the refrain: “Accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative.” Those who lived through the Great Depression and World War II often developed one of two responses to life: fear or hope, or perhaps a mix of both. You can see hope in songs like this one. And I definitely saw it in my mother when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. Without fail, she always looked for the positive in any situation, person, or event. If someone behaved in an unpleasant manner, my mother’s response was inevitably, “She means well.” And then she would find something nice to say about the person.

She looked for the good in the world around her on a daily basis—the beauty of the sky, birdsong in the backyard, music and poetry, my dad’s sense of humor. She framed life this way. It wasn’t just a coping mechanism for the times; it arose from deep in her soul. I came to realize this fully later in her life when she was hospitalized and had to have a serious operation. I flew to my Illinois hometown from San Francisco, where I lived at the time. I sat by her side for three days and nights, our hands inseparably clasped in a lifetime of mother-daughter love. I watched her face, pale and drawn with pain, light up when she turned and looked at me: “You’re always there,” she whispered.

And I watched her eyes scan a basically ugly hospital room and finally light on the one thing she could honestly see beauty in: “Isn’t that a lovely walnut door?” That was the essence of my mother. That was who she was at the deepest level, beyond pain, beyond medication, beyond hospitals. From her soul, in every waking moment of her life, she looked around to find beauty—and she always found it. This was her legacy to me; I carry that positivity in my genes. I carry the memory of her waking me each morning with “Good morning, merry sunshine” and then at breakfast: “Another beautiful day!” From the beginning of my life, I was imprinted with that ability to love life fully under any circumstance.

My mother didn’t live a life free of all pain and difficulty; like all of us, she faced challenges. But she lived a life of appreciation and gratitude for the moments of love, beauty, and connection that are always present if we but open our eyes (and hearts) to see them. My mother lived with an open heart. She found happiness in loving the people and the world around her. At this time of great change and great challenge on the planet, I look to her wisdom to sustain me and uplift me through the rest of my life. I know I was born for a reason, and I know she was my mother for a reason. There is an ancestral line of positive energy that runs through our lives. She passed it on to me to sustain me—and as a reminder, so that I never forget that we all have positive energy within us.

We are each alive at this key transformational juncture in world history to remind each other of that. No matter what disturbing events in the external world show up each day, we still carry hope in our hearts and souls. We can listen to the voices that say “We shall overcome” and “All you need is love” instead of those that speak separation and hatred into the world. Whatever is occurring now is part of our evolution, as a species, as a planet, as a universe. We are not done yet. There is always, always possibility and positivity within us. We can breathe that into the world in all that we say and do. And that becomes our legacy of love…