GRATITUDE AND SIMPLE PLEASURES

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These are some of my favorite passages in “Recipes for a Sacred Life: True Stories and a Few Miracles” by Rivvy Neshama.



— So there I was practicing gratefulness, and on good days, no problem. “Oh thank you for this lovely sky. And my dear family. And thank you for my loving husband, John.”

Then, when the dark days came, I would struggle to feel gratitude but find it forced and phony. I’d be praying, “Thank you, God, I’m really grateful for this lesson . . . or challenge . . . or, um, chance to grow . . .”—but I wasn’t. What I wanted to say was “Help! Make things better! This is so not okay!”

Then I found a little book by Richard Carlson: Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff . . . and It’s All Small Stuff. He wrote that the happiest people he knew were hardly happy all the time. That’s encouraging. In fact, they could really get down. All right! The key seemed to be their awareness that bad times and bad moods will come. So rather than fight them, they just accept them and wait for them to pass—yeah, but bad times can get worse and drag on and—and they pass a lot quicker, Carlson added, if you accept them with grace.

Ah, now I got it. It was like finding the missing piece of a puzzle. Good day, be grateful. Bad day, be graceful. Be grateful, be graceful, and on it goes.

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— It wasn’t until I moved to Boulder that I discovered the joys of a clothesline. When John first asked me to leave Manhattan and join him out West, I pictured him fetching me in a covered wagon. Leaving the city that never sleeps for what was then a sleepy town made me feel like a pioneer woman (“Rivvy of the Prairies”), and so did using a clothesline. I guess I was finally learning the simple tasks of daily life. And after years of urban living, I relished each old-fashioned chore.

I loved standing barefoot in the grass, using wooden pegs to hang our sheets. I delighted in watching them blow in the wind as the sun and air naturally dried them. And later, when I made our bed, I savored their fresh, sweet scent and remembered how, as a child, I would walk between and smell the sheets my mother hung to dry.

Now, I admit it: The clothesline broke and I reunited with our electric dryer. No worries, I told John. We can still save energy. I’ll just wash less often . . . and vacuum less too!

But now and then, I still hang something out to dry, and that always feels right. And when we’d phone John’s ninetyseven-year-old mother in England, she’d often tell us she was just outside, hanging the wash to dry. She never did anything but. So this one’s a recipe from Dorothy Wilcockson (“Dorothy of Mole Valley”), who knew the joy of simple pleasures.