The Artist's Way

My grandmother lived with that man in tiled Spanish
houses, in trailers, in a tiny cabin halfway up a mountain, in
a railroad flat, and, finally, in a house made out of ticky-
tacky where they all looked just the same. “I don’t know
how she stands it,” my mother would say, furious with my
grandfather for some new misadventure. She meant she
didn’t know why.
The truth is, we all knew how she stood it. She stood it by
standing knee-deep in the flow of life and paying close
attention.
My grandmother was gone before I learned the lesson her
letters were teaching: survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies
in paying attention. Yes, her letters said, Dad’s cough is
getting worse, we have lost the house, there is no money
and no work, but the tiger lilies are blooming, the lizard has
found that spot of sun, the roses are holding despite the
heat.
My grandmother knew what a painful life had taught her:
success or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do
with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always,
to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift
of paying attention.
In a year when a long and rewarding love affair was
lurching gracelessly away from the center of her life, the
writer May Sarton kept A Journal of a Solitude. In it, she
records coming home from a particularly painful weekend
with her lover. Entering her empty house, “I was stopped by
the threshold of my study by a ray on a Korean