Bad Work Days, Grateful

Wondering about the Well

September 8, 2012

And then there are the days that the well seems to run dry.

Bad people at work—I mean really bad, lying, ethically challenged, morally corrupt, the list of adjectives go on.  Simply put, imagine Republicans.

My shoulder like always is killing me.  Can barely turn my head to back out of my garage.

One of my stock accounts tells me that I shouldn’t pay attention to the daily summary as their computers aren’t really good!?!?

My little Noble doesn’t seem to want to eat his morning wet breakfast.

My hair consistently looks like shit.

In a nutshell, I don’t feel very grateful.

I think a lot about my utter dearth of gratitude at 2:30 pm – and feel pretty bummed about it.  After all, I have a great home, husband, career, friends,  enough money to do what I want, buy what I have a hankering for—how dare I not be grateful.

Then it dawns on me that I am simply being normal.  It’s impossible to keep up such a heightened sense of gratitude all the time.  Voltaire’s aphorism, “Perfect is the enemy of good” which is what Rabbi Irwin Kula talks about in one of our Mincha Moment videos, is truly something I have to take really seriously.  If I don’t feel grateful at certain points, it doesn’t mean that I am a “bad” person, an ungrateful wretch or that I won’t feel my usual sense of amazement, awe and gratitude tomorrow—when I awake and see my husband,  go out to run, post another video, eat a rare porterhouse  steak off the bar-b-q.

In the end, I guess I am actually grateful that today the well seemed to run dry.  To borrow from my good friend, Ben Franklin, “When the well runs dry, we know the worth of water.”

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