It’s evening.
I like it.
It’s grown dark, but my family is safely at home, and we seize the opportunity to dip to the very bottom of the jar of satisfaction.
If one of us were missing how terrible that would be, but we are not missing, and because of that we are not traumatized.
I am in my warm house; the heater is on; my family is hugging me.
I like the safe, warm, tingle in these cheek-to-cheek encounters, so very different from not being touched, so different from no warm skin-on-skin contact, so different from unsafe and cold and lonely.
We eat chicken stir fry. We have enough, and it fills us up, and it is so not like being hungry, not like the weak, tired, empty, gnawing pain of want and deprivation.
We are deep in the jar. We sigh a satisfaction. We lick our fingers.
I lie on the couch and watch TV; my cat comes and sleeps on me; she purrs. This is so different from nothing to entertain us, from lying on the ground, from having no lights to turn on, from having no pets to snuggle with.
We dip, we lick our lips, we feast on the familiar. These provisions, by which discomfort and dissatisfaction are warded off, surround us now.
There is no medical test tomorrow, no scheduled surgery, no cancer treatment, no soul racking, sobbing loss to wake up to.
We luxuriate within the jar. Satisfaction deepens through the awareness of its opposite.
It won’t always be like this.
I know that, it makes it even sweeter, and so I savor it now.
I savor the deep, rich, delicious, astonishing, provisioned, universal-particular present tense. I dive into it; I suck on it; I down it.
I call to mind the desperate, terrible, dehumanizing opposite of all my mundane and astonishing satisfactions and in doing so turn my jar upside down and pour it down my throat!
Thrive! 