The Gratitude Diaries

by Janice Kaplan

  “Hey, Ms. Gratitude,” he said with a grin. “We’re holding hands walking by a canal on a gorgeous night in Holland. Would you like to appreciate that—or worry about the restaurant?”

  I laughed, because of course he was right. Second-guessing myself—a favorite hobby of mine—didn’t fit with grateful living. Time to give it up. I’d unwittingly picked up the habit from my mother, the master of “should have.” Though when I was growing up, she said it shoulduv. Until I was eighteen, I thought it was a word. My father got upset when he heard my mother ranting about what she (or he or we) “shoulduv” done. Shoulduv, coulduv, woulduv! he would shout at her. Can’t you stop it? She couldn’t stop—or at least she didn’t—but now I needed to banish “shoulduv” forever. I’d learned this year that gratitude didn’t depend on the right events or even the right decisions, but how I processed them. Gratitude gave you back control. I didn’t have to pick the perfect restaurant (or hotel or flight home) to appreciate the vacation and be grateful I was here.

  The psychologist Barry Schwartz at Swarthmore College has made a career of trying to prove that too much choice doesn’t make us happy. We get stymied when presented with too many possibilities (so repeatedly change the restaurant reservation) or when our expectations get pumped too high (with so many restaurants in Amsterdam, I could pick a great one!). Once we do make a selection, we’re less satisfied than we might be—because we wonder about all the choices we didn’t make. Would a different one have been better? The only way I could think to square the problem was to be grateful for the choice I’d made. So now I hugged Ron and we continued walking down the street in a new mood. I wouldn’t ruin the night by ruing the restaurant. I could be grateful for right now, this moment together by a canal, and still find a place tomorrow night that didn’t take three hours to serve dinner.

  —

  After Amsterdam, I kept thinking about van Gogh and whether gratitude really could ease—even briefly—depression and despair. I had only the evidence of the three paintings hanging on the museum wall, and my interpretation of them. So I spoke to Dr. Jeffrey Huffman, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital who has done research on the effects of various treatments on patients who are depressed, hopeless, and suicidal.

  “Writing a letter of gratitude was the single most effective positive intervention we found,” he told me. (They hadn’t looked at painting letters of gratitude.) He thought one reason might be that feelings of hopelessness lead to feeling alone and completely self-focused. Gratitude turns your attention outward, serving as a reminder that you do have connections and people who care about you. (Maybe even enough to name their baby after you.)

  “Realizing that someone did something kind gives so many positive emotions to unpack!” he said. “If you’re being grateful, you must have been worthy enough for someone to pay attention to you. You do have somebody in the world who cares about you, and you’re not alone. The feeling of gratitude can have a profound effect on improving the mood of someone feeling isolated and worthless.”

  Holding the mug now, I thought about Vincent van Gogh, lifted briefly from his depression as he expressed his gratitude to his brother, Theo. I found a book of van Gogh’s letters, many of them thanking Theo for sending canvas, paints, and money. “Even when it’s a success, painting never pays back what it costs,” he wrote sadly. In early 1890, he shared Theo’s joy at the new baby. “I have just today received the good news that you are at last a father . . . That does me more good and gives me more pleasure than I can put into words,” he wrote. He immediately began to paint Almond Blossom for the baby’s bedroom, his expression of life, hope, and gratitude. Despite the torment Vincent van Gogh experienced, he created a lasting ode to family love.

  Most of us can’t create a masterpiece to offer thanks for a kind act, but the paintings on that wall were proof of gratitude’s mood-altering powers. Angst, madness, and despair on both sides—and joy and beauty in the middle. Feeling grateful for family had allowed van Gogh to find a pocket of calm in the midst of a sanitorium. Just think what it could do for the rest of us amid the very different craziness of everyday life.

  —

  Families can be a great source of joy—as well as a font for a whole lot of annoyance, irritation, and (on the baby front) exhaustion. Babies help everyone around them to stay in the moment—what is now called “mindfulness.” When a three-month-old is shrieking, your only thought is whether he needs a bottle, a cuddle, or a diaper change. You’re not plotting about the future or worrying about the past. And mindfulness and gratitude are very much two sides of the same thin dime. To stop and fully be in a moment is what also allows you to appreciate it.

  When our older son, Zach, was an infant, I had heard the rueful comments from an older generation about how “it all goes by so fast.” Even though the days then seemed like the longest in my life (starting with four A.M. feedings), I accepted that someday I’d look back at how quickly they’d passed. One night after I had done the laundry in the miniature washer-dryer stacked in the corner of the kitchen, Ron helped me fold the clothes, and he picked up one of the baby’s tiny undershirts in his big hands. He stared at it with wonder.

  “I love him so much I even love his T-shirts,” he said.

  We looked at each other and then down at the little garments, grateful and awed. Neither of us had much sleep and the baby’s needs seemed endless, but that flood of love trumped all.

  “I never want to look back and wonder why we didn’t appreciate every moment when it was happening,” I said fervently.

  The joy for what happened right now remained our theme when the children were little. (“As long as they’re happy, don’t worry about anything else,” my mother-in-law used to advise.) It’s probably not possible to appreciate every moment of life, and I can easily recount too many times when I got irritable or worried or impatient that I wouldn’t mind getting back to try again. But the mindful appreciation that came from having a new baby dominated my intentions. I refused to believe that Proust was right when he said that “the true paradises are the paradises one has lost.” The real paradise should be the one you were living and appreciating right that very moment.

  A lot of people who knew about my gratitude project had started sharing their own stories with me—and I was delighted when I heard from a new mom named Sharon Kunz whom I had worked with a few years earlier. Talented and smart but so thin that we all worried about her, Sharon (ironically) fell in love with a chef named Erik and blossomed after they got married. She eventually moved to New Haven with her husband, got an interesting job, and then had a baby. Now Sharon told me that baby Isaac was three months old, and though he was perfect (of course!), he had been having some tough days and nights. He would scream and scream through the night for reasons she couldn’t figure out, and then the next day he’d be tired and fussy. He had done that one Sunday night, and Monday was so difficult that Sharon started to despair. But then came Tuesday.

  “At about eight A.M., Isaac and I climbed into bed with a stack of board books and we snuggled and read for half an hour,” she told me. “It was a moment of perfect happiness and I was almost overcome with gratitude. There were more moments like that throughout the day—having a coffee at our local hangout and watching him nap in his stroller as we walked home from the bank. That night when he was in bed, I curled up on the couch and started to write him a letter about how grateful I was for our wonderful day.”

  I admired Sharon’s ability to turn a stressful time into a happy one. But babies don’t always read the script that would provide the golden-glow ending to a story like that. While Sharon was writing her letter of gratitude to her baby, he woke up screaming. Three weeks later, the letter was still “only about seventy-five percent finished,” she said. “But I do think that the tough days make it easier to be grateful for the good days. With life in general, right? The more hardship people have suffered, in my experience,
the easier it is for them to be grateful for the little things—which, of course, are the things that, added up, comprise our whole lives.”

  Lucky Isaac. I had no doubt that Sharon would finish that letter of gratitude. It didn’t matter if Isaac ever read it—Sharon wanted to write down and remember the moments with her baby that gave her joy and gratitude. Focusing on those would make those cranky nights easier to handle (and eventually forget). I was also struck by her insight that it’s the little things that make up our lives. Snuggling in bed with your baby or folding his undershirt amid a wave of love are the memories worth keeping.

  Using gratitude to stay calm can change your relationship with grown-up family members, too. Anthropologist Margaret Mead once said that sisters are “probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.” My older sister, Nancy, and I seemed to have gotten stuck on the “competitive” part. Now we both wanted to change that. By some odd confluence of the universe, my new focus on gratitude coincided with Nancy’s discovering mindfulness. My ambitious and successful businesswoman-sister had started meditating every night and taking yoga classes. She even had a new consulting company focused on mindful leadership. Since both of us were trying to see the world through a more positive lens, we wondered if that filter could change our relationship to each other. We talked about trying to become the kind of sisters who talked and shared and cared. This month seemed like a good time to take the effort to the next step.

  So on an early December Friday, I took an Amtrak train to Washington, DC, for a “sisters’ weekend”—a phrase that, for me, hit about an 8 on the Richter scale. Hang out together just for fun? The last time I remembered doing that, she was nine years old and I was five. A lot of water had passed under many bridges since then, and we had our resentments and piques. We could each make a list of what the other had done wrong. But focusing on past problems led nowhere, and we had nothing to lose by trying to be positive and appreciate each other. The gain might be much-wanted sisterly support.

  My late-afternoon train from New York was an hour late, and I called Nancy a few times with updates. As we got closer (and slower), I knew she was waiting at the station, and I got more and more frustrated. Wrong start to the weekend!

  I’m trying to stay calm, I texted her. At least I’m looking out the window at a pretty sunset. Take a look.

  You’re right! she replied. The sun is burnished red and the sky is still very blue. That doesn’t usually happen.

  See how lucky we are that I’m late? We might have missed that.

  We are lucky. Travel mindfully, sister.

  And gratefully!

  I put away my phone and smiled. A couple of years ago, the late train would have made both of us stressed and tense and snappish. But unless we moved to Switzerland (where the trains were always on time), we needed to rely on our new attitudes—to stay in the moment (mindfulness) and appreciate the pretty sunset (gratitude). With that approach, irritations didn’t seem so bad.

  When I got to the station, we gave each other a big hug and headed out for dinner with two of her grown daughters.

  “I heard you had a really slow trip,” said her youngest daughter, Emily, as we sat down for sushi.

  “It took a long time, but . . .” I stopped. Did I really want to waste time recounting the details of a late train? I smiled and gave a little shrug. “I’m here now and so glad to be with you. That’s what really matters.”

  “You sound just like my mom!” said Emily, with her usual high spirits. “She never talks about bad stuff anymore. She just says, ‘I’m here now!’”

  For Nancy not to talk about bad stuff seemed as amazing as—well, as my not talking about bad stuff. Dr. Huffman had told me that some people seemed wired to appreciate life while others had a harder time. Being more grateful predicted what he called “superior mental health–related quality of life”—which included higher energy levels, better social connections, and happier moods. In one research study, he had charted people who scored high in gratitude in red, those who scored low in blue. When looking at levels of certain positive behaviors and positive mental health, the red lines ran across the top of the page, the blue lines far below. “We’d like to change blue people to red ones,” he said. (Though he joked that as a Democrat, he never thought he’d say those words.)

  I suspected that Nancy and I (and probably our big brother, Bob, too) had started out as blue people and were working as hard as we could to become red ones. Because we’d grown up with a negative mom (all that shoulduv), gratitude didn’t come naturally. But each in our way wanted to turn that around.

  For Nancy and me, that became the message of the weekend—appreciating the good in the moment rather than fussing about the past. Since Nancy had found her new level of calm through meditation, she wanted to share it, and on Saturday morning, she took me to her meditation class. About a dozen people sat in a pleasant room, at ease on comfy mats and cushions, eyes closed, bodies relaxed. I liked the lovely leader, but my mind didn’t go where directed (or undirected). I understood the point of meditation, but it just made me want to giggle (certain things bring out my fourth-grade side), so I resorted to journalist mode. Afterward, Nancy said she had heard me taking notes.

  “I used a soft pen hoping I wouldn’t disturb you,” I said, apologizing.

  “You didn’t. I just felt bad, because if you were writing, you weren’t getting the full experience.”

  I explained that I used the hour for my own kind of stress relieving, which involved gratitude games with myself. For example, I heard a dog barking on the street below, breaking the quiet of the room. At first the noise was irritating, but then I practiced flipping to the bright side. I felt grateful that my ears worked well and I could hear a dog, and I thought about our own family dog that we’d loved for many years. (Ah, Willie, the genius Portuguese water dog who thought he was human.) The barking became a lovely sound rather than an annoying one. And by the way, sitting in the room, even not meditating, I felt grateful to be sharing an experience with my sister and getting to understand a new side of her. What more could I want than that?

  Nancy nodded and told me her own story about gratitude. One recent night, she had a horrible evening and had been stuck in a hospital ER helping someone for endless hours. (The details are unimportant and too complicated to recount.) She finally left at three A.M., exhausted and frustrated, and walked out to the parking lot. Nobody was around. The outside lot was completely quiet.

  “And then I looked up at the most beautiful moon I’ve ever seen. It was huge and seemed to fill the whole sky and had a different color than usual—almost blue.”

  She stood in the parking lot a very long time, gazing at the sky. “I felt incredibly grateful to be in that place at that moment and see that moon. It occurred to me that if not for the events of the night, I never would have seen the moon at all. I got in the car to drive home, and it followed me, bright and bold and huge and blue. I watched it the whole time, feeling very lucky.”

  I told Nancy that the real luck was that she had an attitude now that made her appreciate the moon and the moment. At an earlier time, the Nancy I knew might have walked out of that hospital so angry and frustrated that she barely glimpsed the sky. But now, ready for a positive view of life, she left the hospital and found beauty in the night.

  A beautiful sunset when I arrived late, a blue moon after a horrible night. “Isn’t there an expression about a sea change? I think you’ve undergone a sky change!” I said to my sister.

  We spent the rest of the day walking in a pretty park and talking and talking. Nancy had been through a recent divorce, but instead of knocking her down, it had given her hope for a fresh start. She remained very close to her daughters and felt lucky that they had rallied around her. We stopped to look at a rushing waterfall in the park, and against the scenic backdrop, she
admitted that she had started to have a new view of what really mattered.

  “I get up every single morning and think how grateful I am for my girls. I told them that once and they said, ‘Every single day? Really?’ They thought I was exaggerating, but it’s actually true,” she said.

  At one point, Nancy brought up an incident between us that had bothered her from years past. I had no defense—it happened long ago. Siblings typically let resentment linger, reliving when the other person let us down, ignored a need, said the wrong thing. But instead of recalling incidents gone wrong, I thought we needed memories gone right. I suggested we could restore our relationship by focusing on the times together that we felt grateful.

  “Here’s my gratitude memory of you,” I said. I recounted a childhood night long ago when our grandpa had just died. Scared and sad, I couldn’t get to sleep, and Nancy took out her music box, one of her most cherished possessions, and let me play the tinkly tune.

  “You’d never let me play with your music box before,” I told her.

  “You were so little, you would have broken it!”

  “But you let me that night, because you knew it would cheer me up. I was too young then to say thank you, so let me say it now.”

  Nancy nodded, getting the point. We’d wasted a lot of time over the years annoyed by each other’s mistakes and failings. But how much better to appreciate the moments of kindness and warmth—and hold on to those.

  “How about you? I guess if you have no grateful memory, we might as well give up,” I said.