In 1973 neurologist Oliver Sacks gave us a timeless gift (one of many.) He penned the book Awakenings. Seventeen years later it became an Academy Award nominated film.
Patients frozen into silence & immobility receive a new drug. After years of paralysis each patient blooms, reborn briefly into our world.
One powerful exchange captures the center. It comes from Leonard Lowe, an "awakened patient."
"Lowe: We've got to remind [everybody]...how good it is.
Dr. Sayer: How good what is, Leonard?
Lowe: Read the newspaper...It's all bad. People have forgotten...what it is to be alive. They need to be reminded...of what they have and what they can lose. What I feel is the joy of life, the gift of life, the freedom of life, the wonderment of life!"
Dr. Sacks heeded his character's advice, “My predominant feeling is one of gratitude," he wrote, "I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege & adventure.”
Can we not choose the same, to honor the goddess of the handless clock & commemorate this moment?
Maybe gratitude's secret is that celebration, timeless celebration, is the pathway to joy.
Still, I often find other ways to live, expressing discontent with everything from a morning ache to the seasons of the year.
When I mourn autumn it affirms my grief. When I bemoan winter as a metaphor for death it agrees with me.
Each year spring seduces & winter's fear tricks me into thinking she will never come.
Just as my labor exhausts me into despair spring crowns, pushed from the same earth-womb where you & I once hid. A wild celebration breaks out in the garden of gratitude.
Sachs described gratitude as his "predominant feeling," He knew as do we that grieving & disappointment are as certain as sunset. It is hard to trust that if we make love to every season each will reciprocate.
Amid my wiser moments I lean into trust & from that cultivate the gratitude that lifts us to grace & can transform any moment into a festival of celebration, a time when we can be glad "to have loved and been loved." A time to rejoice.
-Erie Chapman
photographs: "Timesless" (2015) "Wild Woods" (1978) copyright 2016 by erie
