It’s become a bit of a tradition for me to write gratitude lists on my birthday, yet each year it feels like I am discovering gratitude anew. While I always remember doing it the previous year, it never comes naturally to me. Instead, I find myself thinking that another strategy might be better this year – something productive like counting how many birthday wishes I get on Facebook each hour. Yet each year my need for gratitude keeps emerging; each year I have to remind myself of how much I have to be thankful for.
But this year I have Jonas Petersen (aka Hymns From Nineveh) to thank for reminding me that the best kind of gratitude doesn’t focus on what we have, because possessions are temporary and so often only make us want to acquire more. Instead, I want to do what Jonas does in this glorious, Ecclesiastes-like song of his: to “make a list of unownable things that make me happy”. Which is what, on this wet wintry Melbourne birthday morning, I will now do.
Unownable Things
Not possessions;
I am sooner
possessed than possessing.
Not ownership, for
I am owned by what
I long for.
Instead
the rain, which is ours,
falls now on this just and unjust day.
The trees
line our street with their dancing,
speckle pavement with green dust.
The warmth
of all bodies, the truth
that the sun animates the clouds,
the wandering
conviction that today we live
for each other:
all common graces
on this day of salvation.
All gift that cannot be owned.
The Consolations of Writing 