Gratitude - Day Nine

Today was kind of a bust, or as Alexander would say, it was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

It wasn't actually all that bad; I'm just rationalizing the pity party I threw for myself this morning. Sitting here now, with the benefit of a good cry and a healthy dose of perspective under my belt, I can admit that it was actually a pretty wonderful day.

                                                                                          Source: stumbleupon.com via Pinterest

Perspective was easily attained today thanks to some volunteer writing and editing that I have been doing lately for Wells Bring Hope, a nonprofit that digs wells for villages in Niger. Just last night, I spent a couple of hours working on a blog about the ways in which a village is changed when they get a well. I wrote that 68% of Nigerians do not have access to clean water and that 88% lack access to effective sanitation. I wrote about how this lack of clean water and reliable sanitation has created a situation in which one in four Nigerian children dies before his or her fifth birthday and life expectancy is 53 years. I wrote about how 40% of Nigerians have trachoma, a bacterial infection that leads to blindness if left untreated. I wrote about how the burden of gathering water falls to women and girls who walk as many as six miles a day, risking  physical and sexual assault and attacks by wild animals, in order to provide water to their families.

Finally I wrote about how, for $5,000, Wells Bring Hope can provide a village with a well that will completely transform the lives of the people who live there. Child mortality decreases by 65%, school attendance increases by 40%, and waterborne illnesses are virtually eliminated. All because of water. Water - something that I don't think twice about... until I have to go to the grocery store where I have to think about which of the 87 varieties I would like to purchase.

So today, I am grateful for water. Water that runs straight into my house. Water that I can, in fact, access instantly from three separate rooms in my apartment. Water that is hot when I want a shower and cold when I want a drink. Water that is clean and fresh and free of things that can kill me. 

I'm also really grateful for the perspective that helped me to quit my bitching today and realize how * lucky I really am.





*I tried writing fucking just there, but my mom reads this and I don't want to alienate one of my five readers.

Reflections

When I first decided to make a list of things to accomplish in my thirtieth year, I was partly motivated by a desire to have a suitable answer to my dad's yearly, "Any reflections?" question.

As usual, I’ve been procrastinating, putting off writing out my reflections because I don’t have anything particularly profound or earth shattering to report. My reflections, therefore, are mostly just a handful of observations, a few things I’ve noticed or realized over the course of the year.  I like lists, so a list it is.

1.     Turns out, I don’t like horse races. Like, at all.

I never even wrote about the day that Tom and I went up to the races at Del Mar. It started out great. It was Reggae and Beer Fest day at the races, so there was a giant beer tent and a Jimmy Cliff concert scheduled for after the last race. I had fun picking out which horses to bet on (based on their names, naturally) and I even won a few bucks during the first few races.

Then it turned awful. During the sixth race, Fantasy Free got squeezed into the inside rail and fell down right across from where Tom and I were standing. After the fact, I realized that I had inadvertently documented the horse's fall. This was my first attempt at taking pictures of the horses in action and I was still trying to figure out the appropriate settings to use, so it's very blurry. Watch number three - the jockey with the white silks. 

It quickly became clear that something was seriously wrong when track employees drove on to the track and set up screens on both sides of the track in an attempt to shield us all from the reality of what was happening. 

I couldn’t stop crying.  I realized that despite, or more accurately because of, my love of horses, I had no business being at the races. As I stood there, beer in hand, tears streaming down my cheeks, it occurred to me that horse racing was actually rather against my core principles. Who knew? Apparently, I have core principles. One of those principles is that it is wrong to use animals in ways that result in their deaths for the sole purpose of our entertainment.

2.     I don’t read enough.

I love reading. I really do, always have. But for some reason, I have not made time for it. I set out to read thirty books this year, and I actually read only nine! And one of those was a Young Adult book for school! Granted, I read that one four times because I read it aloud to all of my classes... Still, I used to read more books than that in any given summer.  The Piano Teacher, Pride and Prejudice, Siddhartha, If You Want to Write, On Writing, The Pearl, The Digital Photography Book, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Fallen Angels.

3.     I enjoy taking pictures and writing so I should make more time for these things.

That’s it.  Pretty straightforward.

4.     Telling the internet that you’ll do something is a pretty good way to make sure that you’ll do it. Some of the things that I did this year because I told the internet that I would:

{A little volunteering}

{Comenzó a aprender español}

{Rode in a hot air balloon}

{Watched a sunrise}

{Had a wine-soaked picnic in Napa}

{Watched a concert from a kayak}

{Completed a race}

5.     I don’t have to do things that I don’t want to do. Every top 100 list told me that I had to see Full Metal Jacket, and the Netflix DVD sat next to the TV for weeks, but I just never wanted to watch it. Maybe some day I’ll be in the mood for a graphic depiction of the horrific violence of the Vietnam War…I’ll watch it then.