Perspectives

Luck is just that. We don’t ask to be born. We don’t come with a pre-consciousness that lets us preview (let alone approve) the home into which we are, uh, thrust. Nope. You arrive and as luck will have it, you’re passed around as the sparkling, shiny-new little jewel that you are.

I was so lucky. To be passed around and held and I’m sure told, “Don’t cry, Chritty.” I’ve a picture of my sister Sandra holding me on her lap; she’s maybe 5 and I’m all of a year, yet I dwarf her. I was a big, robust, certifiably rosy-cheeked baby and she, just a peanut of a girl, but if ever the cat smiles for having just swallowed the canary, well, that is my sister’s pictured delight. She’s told me that I dropped into her life as a gift, as her baby, too. How sweet it is. Life.

We talk. It was she, who, a few years ago, introduced me to the idea that “We are the universe talking to itself.” Suh-weeeeet. What a fascinating concept. That out of the vast celestial whirlpool, our sun, once upon a time, firmly grabbed our Mother Earth and their chemistry eventually begat us. Talk about sexy. And we haven’t quit chattering since. Since that first moment when, some long ago ancestor coyly stepped out of the tree to our future — a distant time when we were little more than cat food.

We talk. About all such manner of things. And I asked her last week in passing what she was thankful for. We had been lamenting, as liberals are wont to do, the nation’s collective vapidness, the banality of our national discourse. It is such a loss. But one can only wallow so much in the muck of sorrow.

About 20 years ago, I started reading the mythologist Joseph Campbell. He turned a number of great phrases. One of which goes, “We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.” Here’s a corollary: “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”

We’ve all heard something to the effect, “Have enough focus for the moment that as you are falling from a cliff to your death, a passing flower leaves you muttering, ‘Beautiful.’” That is our condition, folks.

We require the ability to turn from the sorrow in life — from a sister’s death, a divorce, a child’s paralysis, your baby now crippled from an Afghan landmine to an environment polluted with such reckless abandon — with as much indifference as that of our ancestors who willingly disposed of the American Indian. And, what’s that? We are to, “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world?” Un-huh.

But my sister, when asked what she was thankful for, said, “Everything. I am so glad to be alive now.” I pressed her. “Every morning before I get out of bed, I give thanks to the glory and splendor of life. And that I am alive, this moment, to experience it. Every day.”

I’m a Ducky Luck! To have a sister who reminds me that livin’ is acknowledgin’. That to be alive this moment is beautiful. Too.

To my faithful reader, may your life be just that. Beautiful. That is my Thanksgiving toast to you. And, luck.