The Gratitude Diaries Read online

  We immediately fell into conversation and discovered that John was a musician who had moved to Ojai to send his children to the Oak Grove School, started by the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. John tried to explain the guru’s teachings to me, which seemed to have to do with cooperation and self-understanding.

  “He said that truth is a pathless land. We can’t come to it through organized religion or dogma, but only by relationships and knowing our own mind,” John said. Or something like that.

  Krishnamurti had lived in Ojai on and off for sixty years—visited by stars like Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo—and the town remained a center for his followers. The guru himself said he’d had his first spiritual awakening while living there. (Perhaps the vortex?) His home was now a retreat where people came essentially to hit the Pause button and get in touch with themselves.

  When we finally got to our car, we apologized profusely to John for taking him so far out of his way and offered to give him a ride back to his house. He agreed immediately and slipped into the front passenger seat. It was the fastest friendship we’d ever made.

  “It was good to meet you and walk in a different direction,” John said. “As Krishnamurti said, you sometimes need to stop your experiences completely and look at them anew, not keep on repeating them like machines. You then let fresh air into your mind.”

  Ron and I hadn’t come to Ojai to meditate or visit a guru, but this weekend was, indeed, meant as a way to stop and get a new view. A grateful view. I could see how that was fresh air for the mind.

  It was early evening when we got back to the hotel, and Ron and I went out to a patio to wait for Ojai’s famous “pink moment.” Because of how the mountains are set, reflections bounce off them, and as the sun goes down each night, the sky above the six-thousand-foot Topatopa Bluffs is supposed to turn a scintillating pink. A dozen or so other people were also gathered for the big event. The sun settled behind the hills. The sky got dark, not pink.

  “It was a beautiful ‘gray moment,’” Ron whispered to me, and I laughed. The other guests near us looked annoyed—either that the solar fireworks had fizzled or that we didn’t seem to mind. Maybe both.

  As we walked back to our room, it occurred to me that if not for my current gratitude mood, I might have seen the day as a dud. We got lost on the hike and the sunset was a flop. I wasn’t wild about the resort, and the weekend hadn’t turned into the romantic wonderland I’d hoped. And maybe that was the best lesson. I couldn’t change the day and make it a perfect vacation, but I could be grateful for what I’d gotten instead. I’d liked meeting John, and my husband and I could still laugh together. By thinking about gratitude, we were feeling ever happier with each other. And that made any vortex worth visiting.

  —

  When we got back home, I went out for a late-afternoon coffee with my friend Meg. She had started her own business a few years earlier, and she strutted into the Starbucks looking chic in a cashmere wrap dress and high-heeled suede boots—but I could tell immediately that she wasn’t happy. We’d known each other long enough that nothing was off-limits, and we often shared stories that we’d never tell anyone else. Meg immediately launched into a litany of complaints about her husband—they’d just had a big argument about money, he’d canceled their vacation to Florida, and she didn’t think they’d ever have fun again. Fed up and frustrated, she didn’t know how to turn the relationship around. “And I’m not even sure I want to bother,” she whispered.

  She looked up, waiting for me to respond with similar gripes, but for once, I didn’t have any. I’d already learned from my research that specific events were rarely as important as the perspective you brought. (My husband climbing a high ladder to do a roof repair could seem wonderfully bold and beneficial when I was in a grateful mood and ridiculously dangerous when I wasn’t.) Instead, I told her that gratitude had started working wonders for my marriage and maybe she should give it a try. Gratitude could actually increase positive neural circuits and make both partners feel happier.

  “It’s pretty simple—but also amazing,” I told her exuberantly. I suggested three steps that had seemed to work for me so far. Find a reason at least once a day to say thank you. Focus on the positives instead of the problems. Tell your spouse why you appreciate him.

  She looked at me like I was crazy. “My husband needs to appreciate me, not the other way around.”

  “It works both ways. If you start being grateful, he’ll naturally return it,” I promised.

  “I’m not going to fawn over everything he does. He’s arrogant enough. I need to keep some power in this relationship.” She looked at me, eyes flashing in warning. “You might be making a big mistake.”

  Her reaction surprised me. Sure there’s a balance of control in any relationship, but gratitude had turned me into neither geisha girl nor Stepford wife. Appreciating my husband didn’t strip me of my feminist credentials. My husband had responded to gratitude with gratitude—the more he got, the more he gave. It didn’t really matter who took the first step. Being grateful had immediate advantages to the person expressing the positive feelings. So I could start out completely self-centered—trying to make myself happier—and also improve our relationship.

  But every marriage is different, and I wondered if, in other cases, Meg could be right. Might other men (less evolved than my husband) take advantage of a wife’s gratitude and goodwill? Yup, babe, you are lucky you have me. So I’ll be out drinking at the pub tonight. I understood the fear that gratitude could be read wrong.

  I checked back in with Dr. Atkinson, who chuckled at the concern. “People in good relationships don’t worry about the other person having a big head. You infuse the marriage with positivity, and then you kick a little ass if you have to.”

  He told me that he saw the best relationships as “alternating between thunderstorms and sunshine as opposed to a steady dull overcast.” I liked that view of marriage. You can be strong and assertive. You can be grateful and loving. But if you water down either of them, you just end up with the mush in the middle.

  Many marriages last a long time with both sides mucking through the mush. Researcher Bob Emmons had warned me that people sometimes avoided being grateful to a spouse because they didn’t want to feel indebted. “In a long-term relationship, the fear of owing something can be uncomfortable,” he said.

  Keeping emotional spreadsheets never works in a marriage. Thanking your spouse because he stopped to buy milk on the way home doesn’t mean that you now have to whip up a milk shake, but if you don’t stop to appreciate the effort, it’s less likely to happen again. Years ago, a Hollywood friend of mine told me that whenever her husband shopped for groceries (a chore she didn’t like), she gushed thanks—and never tried to make suggestions. “It doesn’t really matter if he got smooth peanut butter and I like chunky. I just put those jars in the back of the cabinet and be glad that groceries magically appeared in my house. Never criticize magic!”

  It was great advice, because many of us in the midst of a marriage forget to focus on the magic. It’s much easier to focus on what’s wrong. Instead of being grateful for the spouse you have, you want to improve, change, or otherwise reshape him. Or maybe you look over his shoulder and fantasize about the guy across the street, who is no doubt better at buying peanut butter. You can be perfectly happy with your spouse and still think what life would have been like if you’d stayed with your college sweetheart or given a second chance to the long-ago admirer who posts funny messages for you on Facebook.

  I once wrote a funny novel called The Men I Didn’t Marry, and whenever I wore the pink logoed T-shirt that the publisher made to promote it, someone stopped me with a story. In physics, one concept of string theory holds that there are parallel universes where every possibility gets played out. Whether that turns out to be true or not, we all walk hand in hand through life with the self we might have been if we’d made a differ
ent decision. But all we can really know is the life we have right now.

  I’ve always admired the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by the Czech-French writer Milan Kundera. I picked it up now and found a passage underlined long ago in yellow. “Living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. . . . We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.” I couldn’t do anything about the lives I hadn’t chosen and wouldn’t have, but I could try to make choices that would give weight and meaning and satisfaction to this one.

  —

  Staying positive and connected when we got back home from Ojai was slightly harder than being on vacation. With a thriving medical practice and a deep commitment to his patients, Ron didn’t have a lot of time to loll around being appreciative. I admired him as a terrific internist—smart and caring, a great diagnostician, willing to talk endlessly to his patients and be insightful about their needs. His peers admired him and his patients loved him. But for years I’d griped that if I wanted to see him more, he should be my doctor instead of my husband. In the couple of weeks after we got back, he missed a theater date we’d planned because his patient schedule ran late, and he slipped out of a dinner party during the salad course and stood outside to take calls. Okay, I had to face that none of that would change. But I could use my new gratitude tools and try reframing. Sitting alone at the theater wasn’t the worst thing in life—I still got to go to Broadway even if he (sadly) missed it. By flipping problems on their heads, I could create my own parallel universe right here and now.

  More and more marriage therapists are starting to recommend a looking-for-the-good approach, whether to smooth the edges of mostly good marriages (like ours) or to give warring couples a way forward. I got some insight into the latter when Ron and I went out to dinner with friends of ours—I’ll call them Liz and Dick—who had gone through a turbulent time in their marriage. They’d always seemed like a great couple—attractive, sexy, and full of fun. But Liz was so horrified when she discovered that Dick had strayed (and strayed and strayed) that she threw him out of the house. Quite literally. She put his clothes into a garbage bag and tossed it onto the front lawn. He insisted he loved her, and after a lot of tears and soul-searching, and a full year being separated, they were back together in one house and one king-size bed. We admired that their intense efforts and genuine love had paid off.

  Ron told them about my gratitude project and joked that he was glad I had committed to only a year.

  “It’s been great for me, but I don’t know how much more appreciation I deserve,” he said with a laugh.

  “Don’t knock it,” Dick told him fervently. “Every marriage needs it.”

  He and Liz now went for a twice-monthly tune-up to a therapist who started every session by talking about gratitude.

  “Call her,” Liz urged me.

  So the next day, I talked with Sylvia Rosenfeld, a marriage and sex counselor who told me that couples who came to see her usually stormed in, ready to air frustrations and problems. Instead, she asked each of them to tell her something (anything!) that their partner had done that they appreciated. Making them look at the total picture usually changed the mood in the room. “There’s always something to appreciate. Even if it’s just that he made me coffee,” she said.

  Like Dr. Atkinson, she thought the appreciation moment should come with a tagline: “Do try this at home!” Couples get very good at criticizing. We know each other’s weak points and are usually all too happy to point them out. But part of the secret to marriage is acceptance—“which doesn’t mean not asking the other person to make changes. It’s just accepting someone for who they are. If you’re discussing difficult things, lead with appreciation,” she suggested.

  I got a chance to practice my new skills that very night. Ron was on call for his medical practice, and at midnight, just after we’d gone to sleep, his cell phone beeped and he went into another room to take the call. A few minutes later, he came back and started getting dressed by the light from the closet. He was probably hoping that I wouldn’t wake up and get annoyed.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I have a patient in the emergency room. I need to go see her.”

  I took a deep breath. Ron’s long hours and frequent on-call nights as a doctor had been a source of tension between us for years. I normally would have ranted that it was crazy for him to rush to the ER at this hour and there must be somebody on the hospital staff who could handle the case. I would get angry and he would leave upset.

  But, darn it, I couldn’t fall into the usual pattern. Flip it, I told myself. Find the reason to be grateful. Yes, my husband was excessively dedicated and would put aside his own interests for a patient in need. But shouldn’t I be grateful that my husband was kind and caring? To err on the side of giving wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

  I lay in bed for a moment and tried to think of the situation from another view. A patient was lying scared and sick on a hospital gurney, and my husband was going to take care of her. I imagined how relieved she would be when she saw him arrive. And I thought how lucky I was to be safe and healthy in my own bed with a husband who cared so deeply about helping people.

  I got up and went to the closet where he was getting dressed. He looked anxious—he doesn’t like confrontation—but I stroked his arm and gave him a kiss.

  “I was just thinking about how lucky your patient is to have you. She must feel so much better knowing you’re on the way. The world needs more doctors like you. Thank you for being so special.”

  Ron couldn’t have looked more surprised if I’d done a striptease on the bedpost. But he recovered in time to say, “Thank you. That’s very nice.”

  “I’m sorry you have to go out so late,” I said.

  “Me too,” he admitted. “I’ll try to be back soon.”

  And that was that. Not an earth-shattering moment, but a sweeter one than it might have been.

  As I got back into bed, I thought about the Greek philosophers I’d been reading. Two thousand years ago, Epictetus built a philosophy on recognizing that we can’t control every event in our lives. In his long treatise that became known as The Discourses, he explained that a key to living right is understanding that we have power only over ourselves and our own reactions. People are disturbed not by events, but by the views which they take of them, he said. A couple of millennia later, the logic still held. Ron getting called to the hospital was an event that I couldn’t change (however much I’d tried). But instead of seeing it as a problem, I could filter it through the lens of gratitude and come out with a completely different response.

  Cuddling under the quilt now, I wished Ron were next to me. But I could take a broader view and know that he’d be back. The grateful spirit that had helped tonight also seemed to be changing our marriage overall. I said thank you more. I focused on the positives instead of the problems. I told Ron why I appreciated him. It seemed so simple, but why had I never tried it before? He had instinctively responded in kind, and the warm feelings between us had become stronger than ever. It had been a good month, because gratitude was making us both a lot happier.

  CHAPTER 3

  Raising Grateful Kids

  Grateful for my amazing sons Zach and Matt

  Thankful to spend time with Matt Damon and learn his view of appreciative kids

  Happy to discover why teens aren’t always grateful—and what parents can do

  Since bringing a dose of gratitude and a new perspective was starting to make a huge difference in my marriage, I decided to give it a whirl with the rest of my family. First on the agenda were my two sons.

  Scientists studying the human genome haven’t yet located a gratitude gene, but that’s possibly because they haven’t been looking. Parents who are happy and optimistic seem to pass those traits along to their children, who
then adopt similar habits when they become parents. Whether it’s learned or inherited, a sense of gratitude clearly runs in families. I thought I was okay in the gratitude-for-kids category—but I was ready to improve.

  I got the chance to practice sooner than I thought because my younger son, Matt, called to say that he was coming home for a few days of school vacation. I was delighted, since nothing makes me happier than having one of my boys around. But I also realized that parents can get so busy giving advice and suggestions to our kids that we forget to just enjoy them. So when Matt walked in the door, I offered my usual big hug and held him an extra-long time. Then I stepped back and told him how great he looked. He’s well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a winning smile, and I always melt at the constant twinkle in his eye.

  He studied me closely, then gave that endearing smile and said, “You think my hair’s too long, right?”

  “I didn’t say a word!” I protested.

  “I saw your eyes drifting up and that expression on your face,” he said.

  “You got me,” I said, laughing, and Matt joined in. He’s empathetic and aware and must have an emotional intelligence score that’s off the charts. And since that gives him an ability to read my every expression, any emotion I shared with him had to be genuine.

  “Can’t you look great and still need a haircut?” I asked. And, of course, that was the point. Appreciating my son didn’t mean fake flattery or agreeing with his every choice. It did mean recognizing that he had a right to make those choices (and, hopefully, get a haircut).

  My natural tendency as a mom has always been to jump in with a thousand ideas for what my children might want and how I can improve their lives.

  Do you need new socks?

  I can edit that essay for you.