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Grasping Words of Wisdom on Writing and Creativity from Elizabeth Gilbert and Sandra Cisneros

Let’s try an experiment.

Close your eyes and picture something you are grateful for. I’ll wait.

You back? Now, picture something in or about YOU that you are grateful for.

Is it harder with that limitation? It was for me when my meditation guide, Nora Plesent, suggested the same thing yesterday. I sat in my front yard in one of the two rickety Adirondack chairs, earplugs connected to my phone for a meditation group on Zoom, my jacket zippered up to my chin, closing my eyes to ignore the last-of-daylight joggers passing by. It had been easy at first to land on something external to be grateful for. The go-to gratitude candy of my sons, for example, created an instantaneous warmth in my belly. But something about myself? Huh?! I drew a blank.

It is way easier to think of ways we fall short. I can call up every mistake. Every screw-up. Every judgmental look I didn’t mean to give. Every failure to apologize. All the words I should have spoken instead of the ones I did. All the ways I wish I were wiser, kinder. But gratitude for something in or about me?

I breathed and waited. What finally came up: I am grateful for writing. Not for “being” a writer, but for writing itself. For having writing as my companion…