Count Your Blessings

Yes, even now. The situation we're in is not a drill, but gratitude helps alleviate doom.

Are we having fun yet?

Brown shirts are trampling America under a bobblehead who bragged about killing her dog. Trump’s entry into the Iran-Israel conflict has World War 3 discourse on overdrive. Even if POTUS keels over, as he is looking ever more likely to do, the VP has greater supervillain potential than the OG. We’re already well past the +°1.5 C global temperature threshold. California is burning again.

On the micro, one of my oldest friends told me she’s resigned to never having a satisfying relationship, another is courting serious burnout, and Cassandre’s back just went out badly enough that she can’t cook for herself, in a corner of the world that Uber Eats forgot. “It was worse than childbirth,” she told me when I checked in. Menopause is ravaging every pipe in my body. Latest surprise, after the allover tendonitis: near-constant UTIs.

I, a recently reformed pessimist, have a lavender-scented woo belief in the power of gratitude. When things are looking dark, it could always be worse. I first experimented with this principle while sitting at my father’s bedside in 2005 as he was dying from aggressive prostate cancer. That time included cleaning him up after the laxatives he was taking for opiate constipation gave him explosive diarrhea. We also repeat-watched The Big Liebowski, I cooked us a lot of good meals and we appreciated it all—even the number two episode, because right up until my father became delirious in the last days of his life, he was funny as hell.

I look so much like Jim Marshall, furthest to the right, it’s crazy.

If we’re alive, we have a duty to focus on the crack of light peeking under the door.

I urge you to count your blessings whenever things are legitimately scary. To get it going, I will kick it off on my end. Feel free to do your part in the comments here, or silently in your own mind. That is where you spend most of your time, after all, and you really do have some say in the state of the décor.

Some tips for your list. Include giant things that are out of your control, and wee things that are simple pleasures. Include at least one thing that you brought about yourself. The point is to go all-quadrant: big, small, global, local, active, passive. It reminds you that good things are still everywhere and some of them are even because of you.

My list is long, but your time might not be, so here are five things right now:

1) Both Stone Fruit and Tomatoes Are Excellent This Year

Maybe this is a quirk of European agriculture, because I never noticed this phenomenon when I lived in America, but we rarely have a year when both tomatoes and stone fruits are peak. When one has achieved its juice and flavor ideal, the other is usually mealy, tough and lackluster. Not this summer. Béatrice, Patty and Cassandre have cherry trees that are heaving with rich, slurpy, just-acidic enough goods. The haul is so abundant, the birds aren’t getting them all for once. “Please, come pick some,” they have all said to me. I haven’t made any specific harvesting visits, but I hoover up their full baskets when I pop in on social calls. I can do this without guilt because I know that more is coming tomorrow. Deer and badger turds on the side of the road are mounded with pits. No one is missing out on the party.

On the tomato front, I am eating an heirloom varietal a day, mostly sourced from Provence, and they are ten out of ten, routinely, even this early in the year. I swore this Substack would steer clear of insipid bounty-of-the-French-country-market porn, so let’s keep moving right along.

2) You Don’t Have to Power Walk to Save Your Back

Like almost everyone who sits at a desk all day, I have lower back pain. Yoga helped a lot but recently, hobbling around Rabat and Rome with normal people (Michel, Simon, my brother), I saw that it isn’t helping enough. I walked all the time when I lived in Paris, but out here in the sticks, I’m in my car much more, so important muscles have atrophied.

I started going to an osteopath in Saint-Jouin who consistently cites my psoas muscle, the deep one that runs from the lower back to the femur, as the culprit. “Is there any kind of exercise I can do to help this?” I asked him. He told me I needed to walk, 5km/hour (or 3.1 mph), at least 15 minutes per day, without slowing down or stopping. Because I am an overachiever, I told him I’d do 20. My new running app (!!) tells me that means 1.67km, or 1.04 miles. It’s the distance to Simon and Michel’s place and back, except I am not allowed to stop to do a pop-in and see if their cherries are holding to the rule. (Real-time update: I had dinner there last night; they’re not.)

I started this new activity a week and a half ago, which is how I am up to date on the contents of the local turds. Saint-Maxime is ideal for this kind of thing. It’s gently hilly, it’s green and beautiful, the air is unpolluted, the birds sing, and the cows check you out as you pass. All I have are fashion sneakers, so I am doing it in Birkenstocks. (Yell at me in the comments, and/or suggest non-hideous, supportive running or walking shoes.) Downside: it is sweaty as hell, I can’t stop to take pictures, and I look like an idiot.

And then yesterday I discovered a large-sample study by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, which says that speed and intensity are less impactful on lower back pain than overall time spent. If you go up to 100 minutes a day, you can lollygag along at whatever pace you like. It doesn’t get better after 100 minutes, either, so no need to be a pick-me and keep going all day unless you’re having fun. I don’t always have 100 minutes to spare, but when I do, I now have a dignified option. Please enjoy the fruits of today’s stroll, which started languorously until I got impatient and picked up the pace.

We almost got a break in the heat wave. Finally that came this morning.

Told you.

Usually my route takes me past Jeannette’s place, where she is constructing a new cat amusement park (not exaggerating) on a small plot adjacent to her house. She cheers me on as I go about the lowest-achieving marathon ever.

2008, on a canal boat in the backwaters of Alleppey that turned out to be janky and filthy, and regularly strafed by fruit bats. I was on assignment for Travel & Leisure, and one of my oldest pals came along. (She took the picture.) A few days later, we’d watch Barack Obama get elected, sending our corner of Kerala into fits of joy.

3) Inner Peace Is Not Just a Myth

I started consulting a shrink, let’s call him Victor, in early 2023, after Freddy was diagnosed with terminal cancer and a memoir project I was working on about me and my father was going badly. I have long traced a good chunk of my suffering back to a very inadequate (read: emotionally abusive) early relationship with my dad, so this experience was like stomping on a still-open wound. Where my woes were usually simmering on the middle burner, now they were concentrated to a scalding, bitter ristretto. That must mean I’m getting somewhere, I thought. So when will I come out the other end?

I have always done talk therapy, but Victor is of the new school, preferring neuro-somatic techniques like EMDR and Brainspotting over psychoanalysis, which he believes just keeps people focused on their misery. He sees his mission as reorganizing my brain so that the wounded bits can be reintegrated into normal memory centers and I can let myself do things I have always wanted to do, like writing whatever the hell I want to at least part of the time and not beating myself up quite so constantly and brutally for ______. (It doesn’t really matter what for.)

Victor warned me that if our treatment worked, I may not want to continue with the dad project. That seemed weird to me, but by this point, being able to leave the house in normal clothes was preferable to tweezing the great father-daughter story out of my own aching navel.

A few months into EMDR, Victor was right about the memoir project. I dropped it and haven’t looked back. But he was frustrated about everything else. “This isn’t working fast enough,” he told me. Finally, there was someone more impatient than me working on my behalf! He had just gotten re-trained in a modality called Lifespan Integration, which I had never heard of. He suggested we shift gears.

Lifespan Integration is deceptively simple. Allow me to oversimplify it even further. The patient makes a list of three standout memories for every year of their life. The shrink cherry picks from them to make a shorter list in chronological order and then spends sessions literally just reading the list out loud, over and over, while the patient paces and squeezes a pillow and shakes hokey-pokey style at intervals, while narrating what associations come up. It is goofy for me and probably boring for Victor, but he’s done it himself as a patient and swears by it.

I have no idea why this works, but it does, better than anything else I have done in my 40-odd years of various kinds of therapy. Repetitively re-narrativize your life, add in simultaneous physical movement, and you may realize by osmosis just how much support you really do have, and how much resiliency, and how capable you are of learning new things.

Without making a conscious effort, the tone and tenor of my inner monologue has changed radically. It was like one day I woke up and started speaking to myself in a completely different language and voice, about completely different things. The evidence is everywhere that I can trust myself with my own life. We have our Google Meet sessions in my office, which is a damned pleasant room. I got there all by myself and own it outright. I must not be a complete fuck-up.

When you trust yourself, you can project into the future without catastrophizing. When you are a friend to yourself, you can comfort yourself rather than stew over what you must have done wrong and imagine it will ever be thus. When all of that happens, your stress levels plummet. This took place for me in the space of like five months. It is night and day.

Look into this modality if you’re curious. My neurotic trenches were expertly dug and barricaded and now here I am practically singing you James Taylor songs.

4) Coal to Solar Transition Is Really a Thing

One problem with transitioning to solar on a larger scale has been finding the open square footage needed for panels. Meanwhile, coalmines are tapping out all over the world, and the land is almost useless afterwards. “See? Everything is terrible right now,” you might be saying.

And yet: Global Energy Monitor, which tracks energy use and transition worldwide, reports that China, far and away the world’s leading polluter, is currently refitting 90 spent coalmines to solar farms, with 46 more on the way. If major producers like Australia, India, Indonesia and the US got on board, the transition could employ more people by 2035 than the coal industry is on its way to losing. Even if we don’t include the US because a certain someone wants to make black lung great again, that’s still a lot less carcinogenic bullshit out there.

5) My Family is Doing Well

No one has an untreated malady. Everyone has a job they at least like and a pet they love. Lucy and Eleanor finally stopped fighting. This isn’t a permanent state, so I am savoring it while it lasts.

Bienvenu, Mahler.

6) Bonus Item: Saint-Maxime Has a New Kitten

Right before Cassandre was rushed to the inadequate local hospital doubled over in pain, she took in a runty, tiny new pal. The fellow in question showed up at her daughter’s Emmeline’s house, undersized, wormy, and prematurely abandoned by his mother. But he had that special sizzle. Emmeline sent a picture to Cassandre, and Cassandre “just had a feeling,” which is the universal sign that a cat is calling to you through the quantum field or whatever.

Mahler (not his real name, but aesthetically adjacent) is being raised in a strict enough manner—he gets a timeout in the bathroom every time he chews on people hands or feet—that Cassandre’s human sons feel solidarity. “I bet Alexandra is cooler with her cats,” I overheard her youngest son saying on the phone yesterday when I was visiting. French parents don’t do that Waldorf School bullshit like I do, but so far Mahler is a hit.

If anything goes sideways, I will tell her about how Victor showed me how to do EMDR on a cat.