I’ve had two bad days in a row. Not dreadful days; not terrifying days. Just days when things don’t go well, when I felt a bit like a car that’s not running on all cylinders. Over the years I’ve learned to be cautious on such days. I try not to make important decisions. I try not to compensate for my off-kilter feelings by pushing myself harder. I try to remember that I’ve had bad days before and they don’t last forever. I listen to music: the Bach Cell Suites and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and my son’s piano improvisations. I sing hymns: Amazing Grace, Softly and Tenderly, and Precious Lord. Music always helps.
Bad days are like thunderstorms. They diminish the light; they threaten; they stir us to seek shelter. Sometimes they startle us with sudden flashes of light; sometimes they shake the ground beneath our feet. Sometimes they drench us. But, like thunderstorms, they pass. The dark clouds roll away and the sun shines again.
This morning it’s foggy again and it’s raining. I had bad dreams last night. There are thunderstorms in the weather forecast. But right now there are robins all over our lawn, singing their spring hymns.
The robins, of course, are making noises almost entirely about two or three subjects: food, territory, and sex. Elizabethan musicians failed entirely in efforts to interest any bird in singing, although the composers did create wondefully birdlike human music. (See Birdfancier's Delight.) We humans, however, are not to be faulted for "found music" in the natural world. In the larger sense, our hymn of life is the celebration of life.
ReplyDeleteTo elaborate on my comment about the robins, I offer another poem, by W.H. Auden:
ReplyDeleteThe More Loving One
By WH Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man and beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us that we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
The Auden poem gently pokes fun at the human tendency to anthropomorphize our environment, which makes chuckle along with other readers. Between the lines, however, it posits an indifferent and possibly meaningless universe, which has not been my experience.
ReplyDeleteOf course I know that robins do not literally "sing hymns." Yet we are both creatures on the same planet and participants in the same ecosystem, and we communicate not just with our own species.