Summit Wellness: Gratitude - "The Space in the Attic"  

Wellness can be achieved by virtue of completing a journey and maintain a lifestyle. But it can also be magnified by our ability to appreciate and be thankful for the things that we already have! Summit Wellness continues to hum the melody of connection between feeling good and feeling grateful!  

Gratitude is a monthly feature contributed by Matt Anthony, Digital Media Producer and on-air host for the Summit FM. Matt reflects on instances where we might uncover more ways to appreciate what’s in front of us, and how those instances might contribute to our overall health and well-being. 

"The Space in The Attic"
By Matt Anthony - Summit FM Contributor

“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.” - Willie Nelson

We all need our space.

In a crowded house with a family of 9, it was difficult to find your own personal plot of real estate. Growing up in Canton in the northwest end, my parents rented an old Colonial. Then, during my sophomore year in high school, an opportunity presented itself where they were able to buy a similar house, one that sat just on the other side of our next-door neighbor. Think it was amusing to watch brothers wrestle a sofa down the street? Yes. It was.

My father taught industrial arts in the Osnaburg Local School District (East Canton) and he was a pretty skilled craftsman. And one of the first things he did in that new house was to create an extra bedroom in the attic for my twin brother and me. Like many people at the time, air conditioning was a luxury that wasn’t in the budget. And summer sleeping could be stifling.

“Enough is a feast.” - Buddhist proverb

But my twin brother seemed to run with his own crowd at the time, and that meant that I had the sweltering attic bedroom to myself for large chunks of time.  So, I would sit on the edge of the bed, grab my headphones, plug them into the turntable, reach into my treasured cantaloupe crate of albums (I worked at a local market and could get for free what some were paying $20.00 for at record stores!) for some piece of vinyl that suited my mood, and off to paradise I went.

That private, personal space, in the dark corner of that attic, bouncing rhythmically to ‘Squonk’ or ‘Breathe’ or ‘Pretty Vacant’ or ‘Like A Hurricane’, while trying not to bang my forehead on the inexpensive panelling of the slanted roof, taught me to be grateful for my little plot of territory. While suffocating in the Summer and frigid in the winter, that re-purposed room was my salvation, my getaway. It was a space that allowed me to spend quality time with everyone from The Kinks to Dire Straits to Miles Davis. But more importantly, it taught me the importance of something that every human person needs and requires: time to reflect, time to evaluate, and time to find a way to be grateful for the things we have.

“And a voice seemed to say to me, ‘You are an old man and you have not said thank you; you have not brought your gratitude back to the soil from which this fragrance arose’." - Leonard Cohen

Today, I struggle with even the simplest home-repair project. My father, the wood-working magician, taught us absolutely nothing when it came to building or constructing anything. I’m not even sure he taught us how to pound a nail into a piece of board. A huge fan of sports and an athlete himself (he was called up to Pittsburgh for two weekends as a backup catcher for the Pirates in the early 50’s), he was much more interested in making sure that we knew how to dribble a basketball with our opposite hand, or that we were familiar with being able to block a pitch in the dirt or being able to properly tackle a player so that we didn’t injure ourselves.

But I’m extremely grateful that he took the time to use his skills to renovate that attic space, with cheap plywood on the walls and a thin but comfortable carpet-remnant. Today, at almost 95, he claims not to remember re-purposing that room for us when I remind him about it. But I remembered to tell him during my last visit that I was grateful for that space. A space for me, a turntable, and a cantaloupe crate full of albums.