A Fortuitous Bounty
Today's post is a guest post from Heather Johnston, and the text is an excerpt (with minor spoilers) from the 2022 novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin:
She unlocked the door, and they walked through to the small backyard. It was fall, and two of their three fruit trees were in season: a Fuyu persimmon tree and a guava tree.
“Sadie, do you see this? This is a persimmon tree! This is my favorite fruit.” Marx picked a fat orange persimmon from the tree, and he sat down on the now termite-free wooden deck, and he ate it, juice running down his chin. “Can you believe our luck?” Marx said. “We bought a house with a tree that has my actual favorite fruit.”
Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met—he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know—were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before. *My God*, she thought, *he is so easy to love*. “Shouldn’t you wash that?” Sadie asked.
“It’s our tree. Nothing’s touched it except my grimy hand,” Marx said.
“What about the birds?”
“I don’t fear the birds, Sadie. But you should have one of these.” Marx stood, and he picked another fruit for himself and one for her. He walked over to the hose at the side of the house, and he rinsed the persimmon. He held out the fruit to her. “Eat up, my love. Fuyus only yield every other year.”
Sadie took a bite of the fruit. It was mildly sweet, its flesh somewhere between a peach and a cantaloupe. Maybe it was her favorite fruit, too?
Within my lifetime, there seems to have been a shift in public conversations around mental health and wellbeing away from emphasizing positive thinking and toward accepting unpleasant feelings. In general I believe this is a helpful change. I certainly experienced significant improvements in my mental health when I stopped trying to force myself to feel happier and instead began practicing tolerating negative emotions.
With that said, there have been moments in my life when a small change in perspective has made me instantly happier or better off. Many of these instances occurred after calling a friend to complain, and hearing them point out a different perspective. (Of course there is an art to this—I don't want my friends to respond to every difficult situation by telling me to look on the bright side.) This passage reminds me how lovely it is to have people in my life who model deliberate optimism and gratitude.
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