THE PLANET ON THE TABLE
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.
Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.
His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.
It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
What is truly glorious about this late poem from Stevens, who is often landed with the mantle of difficult or “philosophical” poet, is the intense simplicity and directness with which he interrogates that perennial question “Why Poetry?”.
Why do we continue to write or read poetry?
I ask myself this question on an almost daily basis. Stevens reply here might be: “Don’t bother with too much PoMo theorising, my friend.” Poems are word-snapshots, capturing “a remembered time”, perhaps with a nod to Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquillity”, or Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, or that wonderful Milosz memento-mori Encounter: Equally we might write or read to capture, retain, be reminded of “something seen that [we] liked”.
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.
I wonder if Stevens, writing now, would choose the pronoun “his” for Ariel? I am almost tempted while learning this poem by heart to change the first line “he had written” to the more gender neutral “they”. As a spirit of air, Ariel brings our attention to the shifting nature of gender — triggering anxiety about what counts as masculine/feminine, and what this might mean for our legal and social systems. Poetry is often Othered in this way too, sometimes “enslaved” to a-poem-about a theme, as Prospero does with everyone on the island, imprisoning them in normative discourse.
Yesterday, walking the dog, I saw a young boy, about 10 years old, exiting his Mum’s car, with knitting needles and the beginnings of a yellow scarf carried carefully in his hands. Almost as if he were holding a mobile phone, with the unselfconscious ease and tranquillity which we all have towards those objects now. He didn’t seem in any way ashamed of his knitting as he noticed me noticing it. I was so pleased to see this, while at the same time aching with the understanding that in a few years time or less, all evidence of an interest in knitting, sewing or any other other activity traditionally associated with the other gender, will most likely be hidden away in a bedroom closet.
Does not Ariel and maybe even poetry itself ask us to step outside of these hierarchical structures of race and sex in order to dwell, impossibly-bodiless, in the space of a poem? In the Tempest, there are a scattering of adjectives, but no sexed or gendered markers linked to the “brave”, “delicate”, “fine” spirit that is Ariel. Ariel is also an “actor”, as is Prospero, even though the latter plays Director, commanding others to carry out his desires.
Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.
It is here that Stevens, like a wily Prospero starts to play with us. If we file poems under the category Makings of the Sun (the word “other” suggests he does), then who wrote these poems? What is Ariel up to when they’re not serving Prospero? Do they exist, unconsciously, like some of the other makings of the sun – the plants and trees, animals and weather? Or are they more like us, conscious, often painfully self-conscious agents of our own makings?
If poems are also makings of the sun, following universal rules, then they too are “waste and welter”, not the timeless anthologised entities we sometimes refer to, especially in academic discourse. Less Grecian urns, more organic matter, like compost. The Anxiety of Waste and Welter is a state I often experience in my garden. All those hardy annuals I’d nurtured from seed, having had their flowering moment-in-the-sun, now starting to get leggy, blowsy, and soon frayed, desiccated as they turn to seed. As do we.
I also have this sensation when walking around my local park, seeing the scatter of detritus from last night’s picnics left in the grass, or piled up around bins: the half-eaten tubs of coleslaw, the wine bottles with their vinegary dregs, the grease-smeared pizza cartons.
Also when rummaging around old journals housed in those frustrating sliding stacks at the Poetry Library on the Southbank, or browsing shelves filled with the faded and now unread volumes of verse, poems that once held so much hope and ardour, so much pomp and circumstance in their Launch Parties and rah-rah Readings. Waste and welter offers a kind of disillusioned, and for me, comforting perspective on the shiny, just-published volumes appearing on bookshop tables. The hundreds of new poems that get a momentary tweet or two, a few seconds of attention (not even a Warhollian 15 minutes anymore) on a social media feed, and then never for the most part, are heard of again.
Helen Vendler, still the most perspicacious commentator on Stevens, and maybe on poetry in general, reminds us in her book Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire that Stevens is the poet of Desire, although not frequently thought of in this way. Especially when it comes to overmastering and mercilessly renewed desire: “Each moment of reflection, for him, is a rebirth of impulse toward fulfillment, as desire reaches for its object—sexual, religious, epistemological, or (encompassing them all) aesthetic. Hunger, for Stevens, is our eternal condition: famished for fulfillment, we achieve it uncertainly and not for long, but radiantly nonetheless.”
Too:
“No one since Shelley has felt so strongly as Stevens the perpetual vanishing before us of objects of desire and the reformulating energy of the ever-desiring self. To create the new we must first de-create the old; and the reality of decreation (as Stevens called it, borrowing the word from Simone Weil) is as strong as the reality of creation. It is for this reason that Penelope’s web becomes for Stevens the very image of human desire: woven afresh every day, it is unraveled again every evening; and each exhilaration of possession is followed by the despair of disbelief. “The powerful mirror of our wish and will” (Poem with Rhythms) is forever showing us a new illusion. In the end, desire is indistinguishable from despair, once we have understood the endlessness of its quest. Coleridge, who wrote the seminal poem of this theme, which he called Constancy to an Ideal Object, protects his ignorant protagonist, the woodman, from the knowledge that the phantom he pursues is one created in the fog by his own shadow.”
Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.
Why is the shrub writhing? Is it the Penelope’s web of this poem? Is it already, at some level, aware of the fact that it is at its peak, and can only descend into decay? My mother, who is 70 complains about having to go on statins for her cholesterol; dreads, having had bad experiences of their side-effects, the awfulness of having to pump one’s body full of drugs to keep going. I wonder somewhat irritably to myself (though do not say it): “Did you think it would be any different for you? How might sickness, aging, death have manifested if not like this?”
We are here again at the crossroads of so-called Reality and Art, the Eternal Poem versus the Decaying Mortal Body. As if poems existed in this other “hallowed” place apart from everything else given over to decay and ultimate insignificance. In the next stanza, these two seemingly divergent paths meet:
His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.
I love this. It feels like a get-out-jail (if existence is a kind of jail) free card. Poetry, like us, like all organic matter, is that which grows and flowers and then dies in the heat of our own and others’ interest.
It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
Why the word lineament? Well, predominantly, we are talking about lines here. Lines of poetry, but also the outline that makes everything exist as it is, that seperates one living form from another. Rivers are lines, trees are lines, we are lines (stick figures!) the whole of existence a series of largely separate, but occasionally intersecting lines.
But it’s the word “affluence” that really gets to the heart of the question what value poetry might have in our lives, or what value anything has when we find ourselves eventually levelled to that all-encompassing category “makings of the sun”? Affluence makes us think here predominantly of physical capital and wealth: money, property, and other material goods. The roots of the word are almost the opposite of this, connected more to shape-shifting Ariel than power-wielding Prospero: from the Latin affluentia, af- + flu- flow + -entia -ence. Affluence is thus flow, as in water or air, not yachts or jets, or waterskis.
Affluence is doing something we love, like learning a poem by heart or writing a poem with heart, autotelic moments of learning, moving, gardening, creativity, conversation, lovemaking; moments that provide us with feelings of focus, inner clarity, serenity, timelessness, even ecstasy. We all understand that this is our true wealth, and often in our accumulation of “things” (in my case: books, films, poems, articles on my laptop to be consumed at a later date) we are really accumulating are future possibilities to experience flow, which then begs the questions, why not just focus on The Affluence of Now instead.
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
There’s something almost heartbreaking about that line “in the poverty of their words”. We suddenly see just how insubstantial these things we call poems are: these ramshackle, pasted together bits of wordgauze made out of shape-shifting letters. No less vulnerable than anything else “of the planet”, and maybe even the planet itself, this chunk of rock covered with different kinds of lineament, confluence, affluence in the shape of its organic material.
Big lineaments like blue whales, or giant sequoias, The Great Barrier Reef, or the 80,000 year old Pando aspen grove, its interconnected confluence of root spread out over 106 acres. But also, small stuff: the miniscule lineament-confluence-affluence of microorganisms inhabiting our bodies – outnumbering human cells by 10 to 1. Or individual poems/koans like this The Planet on the Table. Even more so, essays like this one about The Planet on the Table, floating around out here, another speck of microbial matter in the deluge of cybercontent. Space! Cyber, but also all the other forms of emptinesses, such as the expanse existing between celestial bodies, between me who write this one Sunday morning and you reading it now. All of us in the same space, bound to each other, and the planet, but otherwise, completely untethered and disconnected.
Yikes.
What I’m calling the blahs may be the blues, or maybe a cousin of the blues. It presents itself as a general abatement of interest, gratification, and faith in the offerings of the world. It is a state in which the monotony of equivalence holds sway. Roethke 
THE PATIENCE OF ORDINARY THINGS
The Superego is particularly hot on what we might call black and white thinking, a concept that is as old as psychology itself, going back all the way Pierre Janet’s notions about dissociation which forms the bedrock to ideas hold about personality and “taste”. Freud first wrote of the Superego, which he called the Ego-Ideal in his essay On Narcissism, describing the processes by which we internalize the idealized objects of infantile love (our parents), providing us then with a libidinal bridge across which to make contact (cathect) with the world around us. Borrowing the strength of these parental gods, fortified by teachers and other authority figures (literary critics, as well as the hive-mind of various media) we begin to fall under the spell of these outer, then inner injunctions and prohibitions in the form of conscience or morality or taste. As far as literature is concerned: this poem kosher (meaning “proper”), this poem traif (improper, “torn”, from the last verse of Exodus: “you must not eat flesh torn by beasts in the field; to the dogs you shall cast it.”).
The Social Media Superego (henceforth SMS) would most likely ignore this poem because it is written by an 83-year old heterosexual white woman and falls into a genre that one might broadly label as “spiritual”, even religious. Had it come from the pen of of another straight, white septua-,octo-, or even nonogenarian writer, one of the more edgy darlings of SMS (Jean Valentine, Joan Didion, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Renata Adler, Diana Athill), it would no doubt be celebrated, which is to say retweeted avidly by the most active Twitter demographic, 18 – 29 year-olds.
The Canonical Superego is often at war with The Social Media Superego, and would probably give SMS favourites (Smith, Vuong, Akbar, say) as well as Pat Schneider a wide berth. Schneider because she is (so it tells me) “two-a-penny common in the kind of poetry she writes”. “Twee” is a word the Canonical Superego uses when talking about this poem. With regard to my SMS favourites, it might label them as a form of modish froth or spume tossed about on the transient waves of literary fashion. The Canonical Superego is to a greater or lesser extent misogynistic, racist, and elitist. Not a good combo.
The Indisputable Superego is perhaps not as vocal or as visible as the other two, perhaps because it doesn’t really have to convince you of much. For its taste in art or literature is…well…Indisputable. Which is to say that not even Social Media Superego or Canonical Superego would have a problem with me byhearting an Elizabeth Bishop poem. “Yes of course you love Bishop,” they say and smile at each other, half-surprised at being briefly in agreement. I’m trying to think of the select few writers who the Indisputable Superego might champion: perhaps you can help me out with this? Writers who are edgy enough to please SM Superego as well as firmly cemented into the canon. Samuel Beckett? Hopkins? Thoreau? Dostoevsky? DeLillo?
So how to deal with these three Literary Superegos. They do need to be dealt with. Persistent Superego/Inner-Critic activity can satanically grind us down if left unchecked.
Days pass where I forget the mystery.
My own heart let me more have pity on; let
How does this work? Building on the research of Richard Davidson, and Jaak Panksepp, key to understanding the power of De Profundis prayers or poems lies in grasping the basic emotional circuitry shared by every mammal from humans to rats.
What comes out of this poem is the necessity for what our current healing practitioners, aka science-ratified psychologists, might call Dialogue Based Mindfulness, which is also a key aspect to many therapeutic practices like Schema Therapy or Internal Family Systems.
Recently I’ve been 
[Read Kaveh Akbar’s poem 
[Read Lauren Camp’s “The Day You Stop” 
When learning a poem, there is sometimes a line, or maybe even a word which one is itching to rewrite. I am itching to get rid of that deity in the first stanza. Surely any of these edits would be preferable?
“So you’re going to learn ‘
The mind is a lemon squeezer. The poem is a lemon. When you cut a poem open and begin to learn it, pressing the poem into the grooves of the mind, rotating it back and forth in memory until it cleaves to the mind, releasing more and more of its meaning, you get the best of the poem and it gets the best of you.
The morning mind is overfull, not sure where to place itself. The poem gives it a place to settle.
There is an approach to reading (broadly speaking Structuralism, or Literary 
Hopkins loved words.
In the first couple of weeks of my By Heart project, I thought I might return to poems I’ve had a crack at learning before, but never giving the memorization process enough time to bed in.
I don’t think I realised how nourishing a single poem might be until I started learning them by heart. Just a couple of lines of language, returned to, day in day out, engaged with earnestly, like prayer, or telling someone you love them.
[Read “Everything Is Waiting For You” by David Whyte 
So I begin carrying around the poem copied neatly onto a 5″ x 3″ Correspondence Card, the card starting to feel intimately used as well as useful, on its way to disintegration through repeated folding.
I’m all for New Year’s resolutions.
For it is, primarily that (a place of refuge), and not just for me.
The shadow-side of patience is procrastination. A form of forestalment, with all the discomfort of inertia, torpidity, but none of the dopamine-fuelled incentivizers. As Hesiod, one of the earliest writers on the subject gravely remarks: “a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin”. Yes, sometimes, it really does feel like that.
All things come to he who waits, is not entirely true. Even the Victorian poet Violet Fane who coined the phrase feels the need to qualify it in the next line of her poem:
Why did I ever doubt I’d get flowers from Jenny?
If you don’t water your plants carefully and consistently, especially those not embedded in earth, but exiled in pots and planters, they’ll soon let you know, becoming pallid, etiolated husks of their former selves. Take this poor wilty tomatillo plant on the left that greeted me a few mornings back: not a happy camper.
If you’re a Gardener’s World fan, you probably tune in as much to see what a Golden Retriever called Nigel is up to at Longmeadow (mostly activities involving tennis balls) as what his owner Monty Don might be planting that week.
The 
It’s about ten to ten in the evening and I’m standing in semi-darkness beating out the rhythm to 
Gardeners take a lot of pride in their gardens. Especially in those plants we’ve grown from seed or a cutting. It’s a parental pride, a feeling of having been there at the moment when the thing before you was an almost-nothing, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it seed. It’s a pride also borne out of constant fussing and nurturing of our seedling as they matured from vulnerable almost-somethings to very needy small plants almost indistinguishable from the weeds around them, to finally the pleasures of foliage, buds and Bloomsday (not to be confused, though sometimes coinciding with that other 
Every day, the hundreds of fronds that make up the lettuce in my raised beds launch into a Lactuca Sativa version of that 80s stadium anthem by Simple Minds:
Having done a bit of a U-turn recently on the Cottage Garden ethos of ornamentals and edibles cheek by jowl, I’ve been clearing some sunny 3ft x 5 ft beds in the front garden with the express purpose of filling them with plants that’ll give me dizzying, eye-popping, heart-pumping highs.
A few months ago I planted some Jasmine beesianum (I’ll call her Jasbee for short) near one of the the wooden trellises with the hope of having her “delicate pink trumpets and a heavenly scent” (oh the come-hither descriptions of plant packaging blurb!) complement the deep purple of summer delphiniums, 
Yesterday, I woke up, looking forward, with possibly more ardour than anything else in my day to come, to digging a hole.
As I 
Anxiety is a complex emotional response that’s similar to fear. Both arise from similar brain processes and cause similar physiological and behavioral reactions; both originate in portions of the brain designed to help all animals deal with danger.
Making great agreements is an art form. Trust is built or broken around agreements that are kept or not kept. Whether or not we keep our agreements is quietly (or sometimes noisily) noted by those around us, who view our character through the lens of 
Does that sound wacky? I expect it does based on the pretty consistent reactions I have gotten in the past when I proposed this idea. People are just not used to a co-creative mode of relating, where we get to be equal partners in creating new ideas and solutions. Welcome to this new world!
Each person is 100 percent responsible for making a great agreement. That means that strategies people have traditionally relied on to get our way (whining, cajoling, demanding, wheedling, pressuring, withdrawing, stonewalling, “forgetting,” going dumb, resisting, manipulating, bargaining, arguing, giving up) aren’t actually useful here. In this new world of great and successful agreements, finding what works for both people is the team goal. That requires each person to show up, be clear, be unarguable, and follow through with what she or he agrees to.
Getting to the bottom line is the key step. It can take some time to get to what this is. For example, “I want to paint the house green” might shift to “I want to look at our house and feel soothing inside.”
Having a baby. Moving for one person’s job . . . again. Having family move in. Selling everything to live on a sailboat. How does this process work for the really big decisions?
This tool contains everything I’ve been walking you through, so give yourselves plenty of practice with it. Take it slowly. And when you can get all the way through the steps, please celebrate — you’ve just crossed the bridge to a radically alive relationship!
ONCE A COUPLE has made a commitment to stay together and work on their relationship, the next logical step is to help them become allies, not enemies. It’s fruitless to take two people who are angry with each other and try to lead them along a path of spiritual and psychological growth—they would spend too much time trying to knock each other off the road. In order to make the surest and fastest progress toward their relationship vision, they need to become friends and helpmates.
YEARS AGO Harville Hendrix, the originator of this exercise, was resistant to the idea of such a direct approach to changing his clients’ behaviour. Coming from a psychoanalytic tradition, he was taught that the goal of a therapist was to help clients remove their emotional blocks. Once they had correctly linked feelings they had about their partners with needs and desires left over from childhood, they were automatically supposed to evolve a more rational, adult style of relating.
A BEHAVIORAL APPROACH proved especially useful in restoring a couple’s sense of love and goodwill. In his book, Helping Couples Change: A Social Learning Approach to Marital Therapy, psychologist Richard Stuart presents an exercise for couples that helps them feel more loving toward each other simply by engaging in more loving behaviours.
“Well, the day after our appointment, I found myself driving around town in a black mood,” Dennis volunteered. “I can’t even remember what made me feel so down. Anyway, I decided that it was as good a time as any to do what you asked, so I stopped off at a variety store and bought Harriet some flowers. That was one of the requests on her list. So I gritted my teeth and picked out some daisies, because I remembered she always liked daisies. The shop assistant asked me if I wanted a note card and I said, ‘Why not?’ I remember saying to myself, ‘We’re paying Dr. Hendrix a lot of money to make things better, so I’d better do this all the way.’ When I came home, I signed the card ‘I love you.’” He paused for a moment. “The thing that surprised me, Harville, was that, as I handed Harriet the flowers, I really did care for her.”
WHY IS THIS simple exercise so effective? The obvious reason is that, through daily repetitions of positive behaviours, your old brain begins to perceive your partner as “someone who nurtures me.”
Most relationships are run like a commodities market, with loving behaviours the coin in trade. But this kind of “love” does not sit well with our old repitilian brains (the part of us that can feel very scared, unsafe, and so responds in a fight-flight-freeze way). If John rubs Maya’s shoulders in the hope that she will let him spend the day going fishing, a built-in sensor in Maya’s head goes: “Look out! Price tag attached. There is no reason to feel good about this gift, because I’ll have to pay for it later.” Unconsciously she rejects John’s attentions, because she knows that they were designed for his benefit, not hers. The only kind of love that her old brain will accept is the kind with no strings attached: “I will rub your shoulders because I know that you would like it.” The back rub has to come as a “gift.”
Time: Approximately 60 minutes.
A certain degree of resistance is to be expected. When a husband and wife have been treating each other like enemies for a while, it’s going to feel strange to start writing love notes again. The exercise is going to feel artificial and contrived (which, of course, it is), and to the old threat-perceiving brain anything that is not routine and habituated feels unnatural. The only way to lessen this automatic resistance is to repeat a new behaviour often enough so that it begins to feel familiar and therefore safe.
You do not have to be good.
One of the best ways to cultivate gratitude is to establish a daily practice in which you remind yourself of the gifts, grace, benefits, and good things you enjoy. One of the best ways to do this is keeping a daily journal in which you record the blessings you are grateful for. Emmons’ extensive research has shown that this technique makes people happier. When we are grateful, we affirm that a source of goodness exists in our lives. By writing each day, we magnify and expand upon these sources of goodness. Setting aside time on a daily basis to recall moments of gratitude associated with even mundane or ordinary events, your personal attributes, or valued people in your life gives you the potential to interweave and thread together a sus- tainable life theme of gratefulness, just as it nourishes a fundamental life stance whose thrust is decidedly affirming.![[Photo by Michelle Robinson: Black Dog Visitation series]](http://stevewasserman.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/19942697499_e750dbfbb3_z-1-300x225.jpg)
![[Photo by Guido Caprini]](http://stevewasserman.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/14393075726_2bfef29951_z-300x170.jpg)
Surveys have revealed that people spend more time praying than doing just about anything else. 72 percent of people asked say that they pray at least once a day; 75 percent of people say they would like to spend more time in prayer, and over half (51 percent) say they pray before a meal. Most of the prayers are casually conversational rather than liturgically formal.
Good health; being alive; no more skin allergies; I’m not fat; white teeth; exercise; eyes; ears; touch; physical strength; afternoon nap; ability to breathe; modern medicine, energy to get through the day; no broken bones. Each of these bodily-related blessings appeared in journals that Emmons’ research participants have kept. The physicality of gratitude is noticeable as gratefulness for the functioning of one’s body, recovery from illness, or for just being alive are some of the most commonly mentioned themes. Nearly 80 percent of his research participants say they are grateful for their health, or the health of family members, making it the most cited trigger of gratitude. Another frequently mentioned source of gratitude is the senses – the ability to touch, see, smell, taste, and hear.
Enter Emmons’ family home and one of the first things you will see is a ceramic plaque above the hallway mirror with the words GIVE THANKS carved in the center. Help yourself to a drink from the refrigerator and you might see a magnet on the door quoting Eleanor Roosevelt: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery … today is a gift.” Now go over to the family room and look at the bookcase to the right of the windows. On one shelf is a pewter paperweight given to him by a close friend containing a passage from the author Melody Beattie: “Gratitude can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend:’
There is some research which shows that swearing a vow to perform a behaviour actually does increase the likelihood that the action will be executed. In one such study, members of a local YMCA who decided to participate in the Twelve-Week Personal Fitness Program agreed to “exercise three days per week for twelve weeks and beyond at the Y.” Once making the decision to participate, the experimental group was sworn to perform the promised behaviour. A second group signed a written commitment to perform the promised behaviour, and a third, control group, did not make any form of commitment.
In the late 1930s, the amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf posed the theory that language determines the nature and content of thought. This “Whorfian” hypothesis inspired decades of research in a variety of disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and education. To this day, it has not been completely disputed or defended but has continued to intrigue researchers around the world. Many have adopted a weaker form of the hypothesis, namely that language influences how we think rather than determining, in a rigid fashion, the very content of the thoughts.
An ingenious series of experiments conducted a number of years ago showed that when people mimicked the facial expressions associated with happiness, they felt happier – even when they did not know they were moving the “happy muscles” in their face. Researchers have found that smiling itself produces feelings of happiness. How were they kept in the dark? Simple. They were asked to hold a pencil with their teeth. Doing so tends to activate the muscle we use when we smile (the zygomatic major). This muscle lifts the corner of the mouth obliquely upwards and laterally and produces a characteristic smiling expression. Try it now. You will smile. Now, take that pencil and hold it in your lips, pointing it straight out. A different set of muscles are now activated, those that are involved in frowning (these are the ones targeted by Botox treatments). Why this clever ruse? You can’t let subjects in the study know that they are supposed to be feel-ing happy, because that would have unintended consequences on the behavioral rating of interest.
If we want to make the most out of opportunities to flex our gratitude muscles, then we must creatively look for new situations and circumstances in which to feel grateful. Just when I thought I had fully grasped the conceptual basis of gratitude, an article came across my desk describing two “anomalous cases” of gratitude not fitting the usual dynamic of the giving and receiving of goodness between benefactor and beneficiary.
Sometimes the words just won’t go in.
