A thank-you note, naturally
There are those who write and those who read. I write and read. Some
who do not write, but read, write to me now and then, making a comment,
disputing a claim, inquiring after my health and sometimes even
insisting that I should write about something that is important to them.
So I have a small readers’ club of sorts, all connected via email to
me but not necessarily to one another. I enjoy communicating with this
‘club’. I appreciate all. I have my preferences though. I am not fan of
everyone. I am a big fan of an old lady.
Yesterday she sent me a short email: ‘I just read this in my evening
prayer book.
“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is ‘thank you’,
it will be enough.”’
Buddhist thought
I thought it was from the Bible. I did a quick search and came across
a man I had never heard of. Eckhart von Hochheim. He was commonly known
as Meister Eckhard.
He was a German theologian, philosopher and mystic who was born in
1260 and died in 1327 of the modern era.
Wikipedia has it that Meister Eckhart had come into prominence during
the decadent Avignon Papacy when there was tension between the
Franciscans and Eckhart’s Dominican Order of Friars and Preachers. He
was tried as a heretic by Pope John XXII. He died before verdict was
issued subsequent to a trail which he made memorable with his reasoned
arguments.
The 19th Century philosopher Schopenhauer compared Eckhart’s views to
the teachings of Indian, Christian and Islamic mystics and ascetics
while some assert that Eckhart’s sermons closely approach Buddhist
thought, according to renowned translator of Buddhist texts, “so closely
indeed, that one could stamp them almost definitely as coming out of
Buddhist speculations”.
All that is stuff for academics and theologians. What was important
is the ‘thank you’.
Million utterances
It occurred to me that we expend more energy in complaining than in
being thankful. It is not that we need to keep thanking people and being
thankful for what we have, either to a divine entity or circumstances or
the contribution of people known and unknown, deliberate or not. The
point is that we hardly ever stop to reflect on gratitude or reasons for
thankfulness.
I asked myself some questions.
When did you last reflect on the things your father did to make you
who you are? When did you remember what your mother did for you? Did you
remember your teachers? What has the fact of being born in this
beautiful land given you and if there has been some benefit, have you
been thankful, have you showed gratitude to land and man/woman?
Have you ever paused to appreciate the breathe that you take,
considering the fact that there are those who have to make home and
world at the foot of a mountain of trash? Haven’t you seen enough
un-limbed people to value your fingers, hands and arms? What have you
given that make you feel you have a right to expect things to be given
to you?
There are things to be thankful for. The eyes that allow me to read
the poetry of Hafiz of Shiraz, the tongue that allows me to declare ‘you
are precious to me’, the fingers that make me press thought on key and
churn out word and phrase, the ears that made it possible for my friend
Nishad Handunpathirana to mesmerize me yet once again with his chosen
instrument, the Dilrubha, the feet that makes it possible for me to take
a stand, the spine that allows me to be straight, the skin that is made
for caress, the nose for the fragrances that will mark moment,
personality and event and the mindless heart that can love and love and
love despite being knifed and knifed and knifed in bloody as well as
bloodless ways. I can turn all these elements into one singular fact:
speck of dust.
Yes, speck of dust. Small. Insignificant. Irrelevant. And still of a
magnitude that warrants a million utterances of gratitude but is
‘equivalenced’ by a single, once-in-a-lifetime ‘thank you’ whispered
with utmost and incomparable purity.
Thank you Aunty. I am blessed to receive.
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