The Gratitude Diaries

by Janice Kaplan

  About a year ago, I drove up to his house in Lakeville. The ever-powerful Jamie looked thinner and had lost a few inches of height from the disease, but his playful spirit was untouched. He delightedly walked me through the real-life American diner that Sandra had built on their property, largely from items found on eBay. When we went out to lunch, he still had a sparkle in his eye and determination in his voice. He had been on various drug trials, but none had helped. We talked about gratitude, and he gave his appealingly lopsided grin.

  “Gratitude? Heck, what else is there?” he asked.

  He adored Sandy and his children and appreciated that he still went skiing with his kids and traveled all over. He used to compete in kayaking with his son Devin, but now when they went to races, Jamie held a stopwatch rather than his own paddle. But watching his son made him happy. When you can’t do everything, you remind yourself to be grateful for what you can do.

  I’m sure Jamie gave in to despair in his private moments (who wouldn’t?), but his public face stayed optimistic and upbeat. He kept a blog online to track his medical progress, and after he had a stem cell transplant and spent two weeks in his hospital room, being alive seemed a great gift. “I was sprung from the hospital yesterday afternoon, walked outside to find May flowers in full power, and Mr. Tough Guy here had tears come to his eyes,” he wrote.

  Jamie and I made plans to meet again. “You should be a whole chapter in the book,” I teased him. If he managed to stay grateful, none of us had an excuse to do otherwise. I wanted him to share his secrets—but he said it was simple. You just had to know that gratitude beat despair and live that way.

  I didn’t get to see Jamie again, and I was devastated when I heard he’d died. His positive spirit should have kept him alive forever, but cancer, life, God, and Darwin don’t work that way. He flooded the world with his grin and stayed grateful for life, whatever it brought. We can’t know how many days we’ll have, so we can only make each one count. Jamie did that. I am grateful to have known him.

  —

  Thinking about Jamie, I arranged to have coffee with Jane Green, the bestselling novelist whom I first met when I asked her to interview the actor Hugh Grant for a cover of Parade. Sending a pretty Englishwoman to the notoriously reticent Grant had been a good call—they cooked dinner together and became fast friends. (And we got a great story.) I’d heard recently that she had been diagnosed with a malignant melanoma, but as soon as she sat down, she told me the surgery had been successful. Grateful to be cancer-free, she was still overwhelmed by the surge of gratitude she felt before the surgery—for husband, life, family, and friends.

  “The time between the diagnosis and surgery should have been the worst—and yet it wasn’t,” she said, tossing back her thick, curly hair. “I plunged into a state of extraordinary gratitude. Everything felt brighter and more beautiful. I never would have expected it. Perhaps when you’re shown that life may be finite, you appreciate what you have in abundance.”

  Shortly before the melanoma diagnosis, Jane had started getting daily texts from a friend whose life was falling apart. His wife had left him, he’d moved into an awful apartment, he had to fight to see his children, and he’d lost his job. But each day, he wrote a gratitude list and sent it to Jane. She was struck that despite how much he was suffering, he woke up every morning and made a conscious choice to be grateful.

  “When you see gratitude working, you realize how transformative it can be,” she said. Faced with her own bad situation, she decided to follow her friend’s example. Despite the unknown of her diagnosis, Jane very intentionally worked to be positive. Every time she found herself spiraling into a place of fear before the surgery, she lifted herself up by thinking of three reasons to be grateful.

  “I did it consciously because I don’t think anybody stumbles upon gratitude,” she said with a laugh. “But the more you do it, the more natural it becomes.” Knowing she couldn’t predict (or change) the outcome of her cancer, she tried for equal measures of acceptance and gratitude. “It’s such a waste of mental energy to be furious that something isn’t the way you want it to be. Fighting life is what causes problems. When you can accept life on life’s terms, you pave the way for a measure of peace that you miss otherwise,” she said.

  Jane told me that she had prayed a lot before the surgery. “I didn’t pray that I would be fine because I don’t think prayer can change an outcome. But I prayed for the strength and grace to deal with whatever happened.”

  Jackie, Jamie, Lora, and Jane all faced tough situations, and instead of crumbling or giving in, they chose gratitude to get them through. They did it consciously, relying on gratitude lists or diaries as reminders—techniques all of us can try, no matter what the circumstance. Each made a concerted mental effort to flip from the darkness and find some cracks of light—and they didn’t do it just once, but repeatedly. Every day. Over and over. You could almost see them working to be grateful, and the gratitude paying them back.

  —

  Browsing around to find other people who turned grateful in difficult times, I kept coming across . . . jailbirds. Not necessarily first-degree felons, but people convicted of crimes from assault to financial fraud. Many of them announced that prison was the best gosh-darned thing they could imagine. An athlete described being in jail as a “really good thing” and said he was “kind of thankful” to have been behind bars because it made him excited to be training again. A politician emerged from his prison sentence grateful to be a better person and father. A fashion designer expressed gratitude that his imprisonment on securities fraud had given him a new purpose and a new wife. And a reality TV star facing fifteen months in jail said her husband would get to bond with their four children while she was gone “and that is something I will be grateful for.”*

  Why were the former prisoners grateful for circumstances most of us would do anything to avoid? I doubted that going to jail could really be such a great experience. And curiously, unlike Jackie, Lora, and Jamie, they weren’t grateful despite a bad situation but because of it. So in contrast to the intentional gratitude of my friends, I decided to dub this version reactive gratitude—an unconscious response that allows us to find redeeming value in the difficult event itself. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert described a “psychological immune system” that kicks in when we can’t change something. Like our physical immune system, which allows us to recover from illness, the psychological immune system provides the resiliency necessary to bounce back from emotional setbacks.

  People respond to traumatic events in ways we wouldn’t anticipate. So, for example, if you fight not to go to jail but that offshore tax deduction lands you in an orange jumpsuit anyway, your mind desperately tries to salvage the experience. Maybe you look good in orange or you’re inspired to start a new line of designer jumpsuits. In the mid-1700s, the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire wrote the picaresque novel Candide, about a young man wandering through life as one catastrophe after another befalls him. (Leonard Bernstein later turned it into a still-popular operetta.) But at each disaster, his optimistic tutor, Pangloss, reminds him that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

  Voltaire meant his story as satire, but on some level, we are all Pangloss, grateful for this best of all possible worlds. Dr. Gilbert found that a significant percentage of people who survived major traumas claimed that their lives were enhanced by what had happened. “I know, I know. It sounds suspiciously like the title of a country song, but the fact is that most folks do pretty darn good when things go pretty darn bad,” Gilbert wrote in his smart book Stumbling on Happiness.

  While gratitude lists and AA meetings require conscious attention and a desire to find positive offshoots, reactive gratitude happens without our being fully aware of it. As Dr. Gilbert sees it, our minds “cook the facts” so the person living through a situation finds it much less dreadful than an outsider would anticipate. He gives the ex
ample of someone left at the altar by a cold-footed fiancé—what most of us would imagine as a terrible situation. But according to Dr. Gilbert, “once we’ve actually been heartbroken and humiliated in front of our family, friends, and florists, our brains begin shopping for a less dreadful view . . . and . . . the human brain is one smart shopper.” It’s easy to imagine the abandoned bride saying how grateful she is to find out now rather than later that Mr. Right is Mr. Wrong. Or the jilted groom being thankful that he gets to date the bridesmaid he really liked, anyway.

  Because we don’t realize how our minds will kick in to protect us, bad events are usually worse when we imagine them than when they actually occur. In several experiments, Dr. Gilbert asked people to estimate how they’d feel if they lost a job or a loved one, if they flunked an exam or flubbed an interview. Then he looked at people who had actually been through the experience. He found that people “consistently overestimate how awful they’ll feel and how long they’ll feel awful.” In making the predictions, we don’t realize that once the calamity occurs, that psychological immune system will work hard to make the awful seem more tolerable.

  People who practice intentional gratitude—making their gratitude lists or planning pay-it-forward experiences—give themselves an extra round of immunity. When Martha Stewart went on trial for lying to investigators back in 2004, she was initially outraged and railed at the injustice of the system. But once the sentence came down and she couldn’t avoid prison, her mind did the reactive gratitude play—this won’t be so bad. At Thanksgiving (once her favorite holiday), she sent a message to her fans that she was safe, fit, and healthy. “Your good wishes and support mean the world to me—and I am eternally grateful,” she said. To her enormous credit, she then went a step further. With a fifty-dollar budget to decorate the prison for the holidays, Martha gathered the other inmates and read aloud from the stacks of personal Christmas cards she had received. She wanted to be sure that those who didn’t have anyone thinking of them could share her holiday cheer. She left prison saying how grateful she was to meet the women there and understand another side of life.

  The philosopher Epictetus again: We must make the best use that we can of the things which are in our power, and use the rest according to their nature.

  If you can change something that’s making you unhappy, go ahead and change it. But if it’s done, gone, or inevitable, what greater gift can you give yourself than gratitude for whatever life did bring?

  —

  Losing a job isn’t in the same category as accidents, tragedy, jail, and illness, but it can feel pretty grim. Now that I understood how gratitude could help a bad situation, I allowed myself to think about leaving that job a few years earlier, the event that led (very circuitously) to meeting Rose and the night at the opera (and many other things, too). As editor of Parade, I had been on top of the world, with the magazine flying high and getting kudos from all corners. We had groundbreaking stories, major celebrities, and amazing writers. But then Walter Anderson, the man who had run the place for a couple of decades and risen to CEO, announced his retirement. We all expected the terrific company president to move to the corner office, but he didn’t get the job and we were surprised by the outsider who did—a nice enough guy and a decent ad salesman, but not the powerhouse needed to lead a big enterprise. When he began firing talented people to bring in his own team, Walter called me with reassurances.

  “You have absolutely nothing to worry about. He’d be crazy to lose you,” Walter said.

  So maybe he was crazy. Usually you know when a job is ending, but I didn’t see this one coming and neither did anyone else. “You were like a general who’s triumphantly winning the war—and then her stripes get ripped off,” my best friend, Susan, said to me later. “It made no sense.”

  At the time, it all seemed random and unfair, and I railed that so much in business (and life) is arbitrary—your future determined by wrong timing, the wrong guy coming in, someone’s arrogance rather than your achievement. When I saw Walter recently, we sat in the back of a theater after the performance of a play he’d written and talked about serendipity. We’d both moved happily on—him to plays, me to books—and liked our next stages. After the smart and talented president left and I did too, the magazine began to sink. The huge profits we’d been making suddenly became huge losses. In just a few years, it ended. The magazine got sold off.

  “Your leaving was the best thing that could have happened, don’t you think?” Walter asked. I looked at him in surprise, so he continued. “It didn’t make you happy at the time, but you would have been miserable staying there while he went off in all the wrong directions.”

  Sometimes the simplest comment gives a new perspective. In Walter’s view, the new CEO had steered Parade into an iceberg, but I’d already landed in a lifeboat.

  “I should be grateful to have escaped?” I asked Walter.

  “Yes, gratitude is definitely called for,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

  I left the theater pensively, reflecting that sometimes what seems like a push backward can actually be a leap forward. I couldn’t be grateful for the sad fate of the magazine. It would have been better for everyone if the right person had gotten Walter’s job and we continued strong. But you take what happens and go from there.

  For some reason, a line from Shakespeare’s As You Like It popped into my head. The banished duke has been thrown out of the court, but instead of being royally pissed off, he wanders through the forest finding “books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

  Gratitude was a way of finding good in everything.

  Since leaving, I’d had interesting projects, met exciting people, enjoyed new experiences. I’d found books in running brooks. Gratitude is best done looking forward, but taking the Steve Jobs approach, now I wanted to connect the gratitude dots looking backward. When I got home, I pulled out a piece of paper and a big felt pen to write a gratitude list.

  1. So grateful I had Susan

  My best friend, Susan, had appeared at my office in what seemed like moments after I called her. She helped me pack boxes, had me write a farewell letter, and generally took control. She showed me she would always be there when I needed her.

  2. Grateful that my brother put himself on the line

  My older brother, Bob, and I had never crossed our professional lives before, but he sensed this time I needed the boost. He connected me to a high-tech media exec he knew in Silicon Valley, which led to a very cool consulting gig in the world of apps, and an entire new crowd of contacts and friends. The job was fun and came at exactly the right time. But most of all, I felt grateful to my brother because he cared.

  3. Grateful to my husband for turning furious

  A week after I left, the new CEO needed a favor (crazy, right?) and asked me to coffee. My kind, gentle, and nonviolent husband never curses, but now that his wife had been dissed, he suggested sending a hit man to the coffee or bringing a water gun to scare the (expletive) out of him. I was oddly touched by his fury. In any fight, I had a loyal partner who would never let me down.

  4. Grateful to the colleagues who understood

  A very well known media executive immediately e-mailed: “You r the best, they r nuts, come work 4 me.” I didn’t end up working for her, but the e-mail made me smile (and not just the spelling). Another colleague called to take me to lunch at Michael’s, the restaurant where New York’s media moguls hang out. I reminded her I’d left that circle and didn’t want her embarrassed. “We’re going!” she insisted. The eponymous owner gave us a prime table. “Everyone’s been in your shoes—or will be,” he whispered as we sat down. It is the only time I have ever been grateful for a Cobb salad.

  Now I looked at my list and knew it could go on for many more pages. I wish I’d made the list years earlier—it would have helped. Fortunately, I’d had some instincts about gratitude early on.
Walking home the day I left that job, I found myself musing how my life had changed. Then I stopped—quite literally—in the middle of Forty-Eighth Street and Third Avenue to talk to myself and reframe the day. Maybe my psychological immune system kicked in. “Your life didn’t change. You still have your husband and children and you’re healthy. All you lost was a job.” I might also have lost my marbles, given the glances of people swerving to walk around me.

  A famous saying holds that when one door closes, another door opens. I’ve seen the phrase attributed to Alexander Graham Bell, Helen Keller, and the Bible—though it’s definitely not in the Bible. The second part of it says that “we often look so long and regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.” I’d had many new doors and windows fling open. I finally felt grateful for the fresh air.

  —

  While doing my research on gratitude and adversity, I kept coming across a story about the violinist Itzhak Perlman and a concert he gave in New York. Appearing onstage to great applause, he hobbled slowly to his chair with braces and crutches, a result of his childhood polio. He finally sat down, lifted his violin, and started to play—and after just a few bars, everyone heard a loud snap as one of his strings broke. He closed his eyes and, instead of asking for a new violin, signaled the conductor to begin again.

  According to a report that appeared in the Houston Chronicle in 2001, it is nearly impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. But that night, Perlman did it. “You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head,” the story said. When he finished, there was wild cheering and Perlman smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, and raised his bow. Then in a pensive tone he said, “Sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”