I was reading the great Alice Munro this week, a collection of stories called Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, and came upon a line that’s been a firework for me during this week of reflection:

“And I thought, all these things don’t seem that much like life, when you’re doing them, they’re just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you’ll find yourself, then you’ll find yourself, in life. It’s not even that you particularly want this to happen, this cracking open, you’re comfortable enough the way things are, but you do expect it. . . . .(But) what you’ve had is all there is, and going to the Library, just a thing like that, coming back up the hill on the bus with books and a bag of grapes seems now worth wanting, O God doesn’t it, you’d break your heart wanting back there.”

And that’s my 2011 resolution, above, a Blake-Munro literary abstraction: to delight in what I have, which is all there is worth wanting.

(Photo taken of a wall at the Ace Hotel, New York City.)

P.S. I’m off in search of snow,  back Jan 6.