I was treading water through one of the darkest times of my life when I really didn't know if I would ever make anything again. And my ex-boyfriend Andrew Altenburg bought me a present for no reason other than a desire to simply remind me that I was loved.
The gift was this simple black notebook, beautifully bound inside a black vinyl cover, about 100 pages of loosely ruled paper.
No big whoop, right?
Au contraire!
The gifts we're given in life are always wrapped in one way or t'other and Andrew's gift of this notebook (or journal, as some would call it) was wrapped in his explanation of its purpose. I paraphrase:
I'm giving you this book of blank pages so that you will have one place in which to jot down all your dreams for the future. Any time you have an idea for a project you might someday like to undertake, jot down your thoughts right here.
At that time when I was paralyzed by what I can only refer to as a grief for all the ways in which I may have failed my own ambition, the fact of this gentle and kind man's faith helped me to allow for the possibility of my own faith emerging.
The wrapping of this gift was unambiguous. It told me that I still had more to contribute, more to imagine. That my work here was not yet done.
We never know how one gesture, comment or question to someone we care about is going to impact their lives. In the case of the soft-bound notebook that Andrew gave to me those years ago, it has grown to take on the quality of a dear old friend.
I have stuffed it with ideas and lists and questions and doodles. And every time I reach for it it's like a salve reminding me that one person saw me and cared very much about my willingness to push forward to continue to strive for more. Within hours of receiving it, I scrawled this in the front inside cover:
When push comes to shove
No question in my mind
Acceptance and love
Are gifts from Heaven above
You could say the rhyme is cheesy. And I might even agree. And that doesn't make it any less true.
Thank you, Andrew, for believing in me when even I didn't seem to have the capacity to do that for myself. And to anyone reading this: if there's someone in your life whose work gives you joy, take a moment to remind them. Sure, you may have said it before in myriad ways. But there's never a good reason for not telling the people we love precisely what for.
