My body is falling, falling against the bed, falling against the pillow which is misshapen from how much I have tossed and turned. I can feel the way the heaviness is overtaking me, just a few minutes before the alarm, a few minutes that, I tell myself, will be more than enough. Just a second, my brain whispers, just let go for a second, I’ll wake you up, promise.
The second becomes fifteen minutes, the children are loudly wandering through our small house, telling us at the top of their lungs about the fact that it is morning. My husband gets up, even though it is more than overdue for me to do this for him. He sees my body falling back into sleep and he closes the door on his way out.
When I wake up my first thought is repayment. How do I make it better, I ask, how to do I make it right? What is justified, what is equal - ancient notions that matter almost everywhere but then in the places they do not, they matter not at all. Like the gift of letting someone sleep while you rise to take their dog outside, or feed their children cheerios and blueberries, or simply keep a watch on the life of things while they fall into dreams with colorful characters and nonsense plots.
One of my favorite classes in graduate school was on contemporary virtue ethics. There, we talked about this idea of virtues - habits of our hearts. What is a habit of the heart, I wonder still, a beautiful phrase that might not have much behind it? What I think I know from thinking about it a lot — in some of those hours where someone else has been keeping a watch on the world — is that they are paths between our minds and our actions. The more that we walk down a path from the generous thought to the generous action, the better we see the path and the more easily we walk it. The longer we practice these walks, the more able we become to walk them in the rainy season or the snowy one, when we aren’t excited about it, when we face obstacles.
Our muscles have memory, neurons tracing pathways over and over so that we remember the keys on the piano or the fifth position of ballet long after the classes are over. And here, the same is true: if we trace a path between kindness the idea and kindness the living action in front of us, we will remember.
There is, my professor said, a match of virtues between generosity and gratitude. Perhaps they are one path, or two sides of the same path - I don’t know where in my metaphor they can take root. What I know is that I make gratitude impossible for myself when I am preoccupied with repayment. Because gratitude is deepest when it is for something that cannot be repaid, for gifts. And generosity is that virtue of giving without thinking of repayment. My preoccupation with the number of hours that I slept makes it impossible for me to be grateful; it also makes it impossible for me to be generous when I am the one rising for another.
Let me be grateful, or try: for the space of falling back asleep, for the way that he closed the door to the world and I knew it would be okay while I rested. Let me be grateful, for the certainty of his noticing me, for the way he sees even before I do that particular heaviness in my body that means I will soon fall asleep.
There is nothing to repay, but there is everything to say - thank you.