Men's Health

A Little Gratitude

But then I wrote ninety-one in the first week. continued...

But overall, this just didn't work. Letters came back unopened. My handwriting got worse with each repetition. I began to realize that thank-you notes, like their verbal counterparts, should not be broadcast indiscriminately like grass seed. I had made the mistake of treating the thank-you note as something easy and casual, vaguely tossed off, rather than something timely and considered. After week one, I started to make some choices, finding real moments from the day before.

Every morning I took three cards and set them down in front of me. I was back to my original formula. Now that I wasn't keeping a running list of every event on my Day-Timer, when I didn't force myself into a frenzy to cover every possibility, I found that I was in a sort of buyer's market each morning; I had plenty to pick from. I wrote my therapist, and a biologist I spoke to at a New Year's party about books he was reading, and my departmental assistant. I thanked my brother for the football he sent my son for Christmas, the one we played catch with until our fingers were dead from cold. I thanked people for parties, for lunches, for jars of jelly dropped on my porch over the holidays.

I've never been very good at this whole daily-reflection thing, but if I ever gave it a real shot, it was while I was scratching out these notes. Time passed differently. I began to look at the day as a series of opportunities for thankfulness rather than obligations to a calendar. The discipline of the writing gave me a morning ritual beyond a cup of coffee and the blathering of SportsCenter. I started, for the first time in years, to work on my handwriting. The morning didn't tear by the way it usually does. I found that I could sit there and reconstruct the prior day by thinking of the faces of the people I met, the tenor of the things they did, and the places in which I met them. With each day, I could remember more about each day that passed.

One day, toward the end of my experiment, I was called into my boss's office and pretty much told my time was up. They couldn't offer me the terms I had been working under any longer, and they wanted things to change, whether I wanted them to or not. As I sat there, my head filled with anger. I could think of three people I blamed for this. Then more. Jealous, petty, careless people, each of whom had declared, without saying as much, that they no longer wanted to watch my back. Thanks, I wanted to shout. Thanks a lot. But I knew by now that no one would hear. I wasn't being fired; I was being dared to quit.