elizabethlevett

Meeting the days. Meeting the nights.

It happens to all of us. You lie down at night and find it hard to fall asleep because too many weird or troubling or stressful things came up that day. Even if you start to drop off, something pops into your conscious mind that demands acknowledgement, demands focus, and makes it impossible to relax. Those moments before sleep finally descends may turn into hours of wakefulness because of something you read in the news, or a sudden phone call from someone, or whatever the heck is suddenly happening with the plumbing in the kitchen. Maybe the moon is full and fat and you feel its pull on you. Whatever monster is under your bed, you can’t vanquish it tonight. You can’t solve anything by staying awake. But still, you end up dedicating these quiet hours to a one problem or another.

They say it’s important to end the day with gratitude, to lie quietly, slow down your thinking, bring awareness to your breath, and think of a few events from the day for which you can be thankful. Here’s the tricky part. Sometimes a day is annoying right off the bat. Coffee is spilled, it’s raining, your car is wedged into its parking place as permanently as any stone in the great wall of China. There are moments when dinner is strangely overcooked, your neighbors moved out and left their stuff all over the sidewalk, Mercury is once again in stupid retrograde (whatever that means) and of course every news story is a tale of complete doom and hopelessness. And then some days, the truly unthinkable happens; your sweet, precious adorable tabby boy cat gets jumped by the neighborhood gangster calico and doesn’t want to come out of hiding even for dinner. Okay, now how are you supposed to slow down your busy mind, breathe softly and slowly, and be conscious of your place in the universe? Now, on this kind of night, what are you grateful for?

I can answer that one. See, we (at least I) get so caught up at times that we forget that something, seemingly small and insignificant, can come along and put a cherry on top of the crap sundae of any day. Here’s an example of a recent confection. I was volunteering in the kindergarten classroom of a dear friend the other day and sitting next to one of her very special, special Ed inclusion students. I was enjoying chatting quietly with his teacher while he cut and pasted a construction paper snowman and then added a pink picket fence as a final touch. I was telling my teacher friend about my cat getting beat up. She asked me who badass kitty lived with, and I was explaining about the gentleman down the street, saying he was a little older than me. The student, not looking up from his work at all, asked, in all seriousness, “Is he as old as Godzilla?” My teacher friend smiled broadly at the marvelous absurdity of his question and I hastened to say, no, of course. This gentleman is about 70. Then I stopped. The first Godzilla movie was released in Japan in 1954. Seventy years. Suddenly I have to wonder if there’s a connection between Godzilla’s story and that of the neighborhood bully cat. Maybe she’s sort of the Ghidorah of the block, the Rodan! And now she’s the monster under our bed. It seems even Godzilla – beloved in my house — had to cope with adversaries, had to lose sleep once in a while.

There is a serendipitous magic in the brilliance of children. What a glorious gift to sit and hang out with this little boy. Moments of rapture can be as unexpected and profound as a sudden toothache or a leaky pipe and somehow, just as necessary. On those tough evenings, after those tough days, I am grateful. I do, very deliberately give thanks. Because on those days, and we all have them, I found myself alive to meet what was delivered. Somehow, we had the capacity to find that package of surprises that showed up with our name and address, sign for it, and open it up to see what was inside for us to unpack and find a place for. We meet the days. With the strength of Godzilla. We meet the nights with the capacity to make peace with the monsters under the bed and with the thankfulness of a child showing you their snowman and seeing you smile. We are here for all of this, and we can find reasons to be grateful. So get some sleep, tomorrow is another day. And who knows, you might even dream that your small tabby boy, the one you named after the mighty lion of Mali, rises victorious against the neighborhood bully.

(Collage by author.)