The Gratitude Diaries

by Janice Kaplan

  “My financial success has been more than I ever could have imagined, but real gratitude comes from the peace and happiness I feel when I’m part of something bigger than myself,” he said.

  Volunteering in a third-world country, he discovered that facial deformities were feared as an evil curse rather than a medical problem. One morning a devastated mother handed him her afflicted six-month-old—and an hour later, he put the baby back in her arms, healthy and normal. She wept in appreciation. “A simple surgery lifted the curse and changed the lives of the whole family,” he said—and in the telling, his voice cracked with emotion. Embarrassed, he took off his (designer) glasses to get his composure and wiped away some tears.

  “I didn’t know I’d get so emotional,” he said. “But I’m so lucky. And so grateful to have the moments that give meaning and purpose to my life.”

  He had recently come back from climbing Mount Kilimanjaro with his sixteen-year-old son and saw the trek as a great metaphor. “Getting to the top of the mountain when you feel like you’re going to die but keep persevering is unforgettable,” he said. “I told my son, ‘Never let anyone tell you that you can’t do something with your life that you want.’”

  I left his office incredibly moved. Proud of his hard-won success, Dr. Jacono felt grateful for all the good he had achieved and wanted to share it. As a way to make yourself feel beautiful, it was better than Botox.

  Whether it was my new perspective or the approach of the holiday season, I started seeing signs of gratitude everywhere—in one case, quite literally. A friend texted me photos of two billboards that loomed over the dense and traffic-packed highways that swerve into Manhattan. One faced the northbound roads and the other the southbound, and they each had a single word: GRATTITUDE.

  “Do you know what these are?” my friend asked.

  I didn’t. The billboards (with an extra T in the spelling) had no explanation or attribution. They didn’t seem to be advertising anything and gave no indication who had put them up or paid for them. Curious, I did some research and traced them to an artist named Peter Tunney. I tried to reach him, but e-mails to a gallery in Massachusetts showing his work went unanswered. I found a phone number in New York and, on a whim one morning, dialed. He answered immediately.

  “Hi. You don’t know me, but I’d love to talk to you about gratitude,” I said.

  Knowing me or not clearly didn’t matter, since he immediately launched into an animated conversation. He told me I’d caught him in the car driving to his studio and he had to leave at the end of the week for an art show in Miami. But he could tell me right now that gratitude counted more than almost anything else. “If I could put up five thousand gratitude billboards today, I would,” he said. “But do you want to talk about this now or come down to my studio and meet?”

  The next day, I took a subway down to Franklin Street in Lower Manhattan and stepped into the crazy, wild world of Peter Tunney. Canvases hung on the walls and stood lined up deep on the floor. Most of them were collages of newspaper clippings made into words or phrases like “Gratitude” and “City of Dreams” and “The Time Is Always Now.” Others had collages as backgrounds and positive phrases painted over them.

  “Is that Janice?” Peter called out from a desk somewhere in the back, as if we were old friends.

  I made my way past a red surfboard that also had a GRATTITUDE collage and met the artist. Tall, blond, and broad chested, he could have been a former athlete, but his jeans were artistically paint stained—his work and fashion making a nice mix.

  The upstairs of his large space was a gallery, the downstairs his office and studio. A couple of assistants talked to clients who wandered in and also worked on organizing the endless material Peter gathered for his collages. His paintings all had upbeat, optimistic messages, and Peter showed me around, offering an energetic stream of explanations to accompany each piece.

  “I’m doing a billboard in Los Angeles now that says ‘Choose Happy,’” he said. “I could be wrong about all of this and humans are going the way of the dinosaurs, but then I’m going out with a smile. I just don’t believe in the other way. I can’t imagine we’re all put here to suffer and beat each other up and spew venom. It seems like a ridiculous waste of time to me.”

  He spent a few minutes talking about the big problems in the world that deeply disturbed him, from human trafficking to innocent people in prison. “But right now, I’m standing here in a cashmere sweater talking to you, I’m happy, healthy, fifty-three years old, and in the most productive moment of my life. If I don’t walk around the street buoyant and jubilant, then what’s wrong with me?”

  Many of his collages had images of death and destruction underneath, then the overlay of positive words. The message was clear—you can see the problems of the world and be unhappy or choose a different way.

  “People drive into a city and see billboards with ads to drink Coke, go to a strip club, take pills. These may be a few of my favorite things, but my vision was giant notices that the world is okay, or you can make it that way.” Putting up the GRATTITUDE billboards (and others with messages like THE TIME IS ALWAYS NOW) became a personal mission. He told me about a lunch he had one day with a wealthy businessman. “I said to him, ‘You have a billion dollars and I have eleven thousand dollars in my bank account. Why am I the one putting up the billboards? Am I the only one who’s thought of trying to send positive messages into the world?’”

  Now the message was getting out and billboards of Tunney’s work have appeared all over the country and in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. He hopes to have signs soon in Philadelphia and Detroit and Los Angeles, and he’s now getting calls for projects in Asia and Europe. His studio on Franklin Street is becoming a Warhol-like factory.

  “I’m making a living selling gratitude paintings. That’s crazy. You can’t invent a crazier story for Peter Tunney. I could paint ‘Grattitude’ and ‘The Time Is Always Now’ for the rest of my life.”

  The poster boy (quite literally) for positivity, Tunney once had a very different reputation. He worked closely for ten years with the photographer Peter Beard, famous for both his shots of wildlife in Africa and his marriage to model Cheryl Tiegs.

  “What was it like, spending years in Africa?” I asked.

  “Most of it was spent partying in Paris,” he said with a laugh.

  He was eager for experiences, which ultimately included drugs, alcohol, models, and many wild nights.

  “The short version is, I went to a party when I was thirteen and I came home when I was forty-three. I met everyone and I went everywhere but I could have died. I’ve seen the world from every dark outlook you can imagine, and a viewpoint without any gratitude—it doesn’t work. I’m not going there again. I just find it unhelpful to be negative, because you have no idea what happens when you walk out this door today.”

  Tunney had been hit by a car when bicycling at age thirteen, a devastating accident that ironically might have been the start of his positive perspective. “My parents said, ‘Thank God he didn’t hit his head.’ I had all these bones sticking out, but my brain was okay, and I’d get better.” He heard other patients moaning, ‘Why me, why did this happen?’ But he stayed away from the victim mentality. “Being hit by a car seemed like a bad thing, but who knows where I’d be otherwise? Maybe I would have gone on to be a high school sports hero and died in a drunk-driving accident. Right? Who knows.”

  He saw other advantages from that childhood accident, including the pleasure of going back to school after lying in a hospital bed for almost a year. “‘A schoolbook! Wow. And look at that blue sky. Do you smell those leaves?’ You almost have to lose it to feel it. You think gratitude is something you express when everything is going well. But really it’s what you feel when everything is going against you.”

  Now with his art and his billboards, Tunney was on a quest to convince everyone else that sinc
e life was random, you could only move forward, do the right thing, and make the best of whatever happened.

  “I like the expression ‘Plan plans, not results.’ I used to think I could run the universe, but it was very laborious, I did a terrible job, and nobody listened to me. Now I’m not in charge of anything but my own mental and spiritual self. My mission every day is to stay buoyant and joyous. My billboards aren’t ironic or tongue-in-cheek. I mean what they say. I can’t put up billboards like those and walk around with my head down.”

  He told me he’d been caught in the midst of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar litigation in New York over billboards (not just his) that had brought down most of the signs. Driving into Manhattan now from one direction, the only billboard you could see from horizon to horizon was one of Tunney’s. “I hope the city fights me. You want to tear down ‘Grattitude’ and put up what? ‘Buy Vicodin’? ‘Go to the Hustler Club’? I don’t even mean it as a metaphor, because that’s what people see every day. What kind of messages are we sending to ourselves?”

  Another wealthy guy who owned a big outdoor company had asked Tunney how he could help him spread his message. “I said, ‘You’ve got five billion dollars? How about you take five hundred million for yourself and do whatever you want—buy a couple of houses, a plane. Then we spend the other four and a half billion putting up “Grattitude” billboards for the next ten years. If you have a better plan than that for life, tell me, but I don’t know one.’”

  And Tunney really meant it. He was grateful to be here, alive on this planet. He gave me two books of his art so I could keep the positivity with me. I already felt jubilant—a few hours surrounded by paintings all about the good in the world has an effect.

  We said our good-byes and then halfway out the door, I stopped.

  “Oh, Peter, I forgot to ask. Why the extra T in ‘Grattitude’?”

  A small smile crossed his face. “My dear, that’s for the attitude.” He leaned over and gave me a parting hug. “The attitude, right? It’s all about the attitude.”

  —

  With Thanksgiving getting close, gratitude suddenly seemed part of the zeitgeist, and not just on billboards. From what I saw on Instagram and Facebook and morning TV, November had become a once-a-year chance for the whole country to focus on reasons to be grateful. Better if we did it year-round, but heck, I’d take once a year. The holiday seemed to have morphed from its Pilgrim origins. The first Thanksgiving was surely much harsher and more solemn than the storybooks suggested, and I hoped that instead of making cheerful Native American headdresses and paper turkeys (by tracing a hand), kindergarten teachers were now helping children make gratitude lists.

  I pulled out my Thanksgiving recipes, well-worn from years of use. My sons liked adventurous cuisines—except at the holidays, when they were firm about keeping family traditions. I was allowed some discretion in the soup course (as long as it was zucchini-potato or apple-squash), but otherwise we went with turkey, bread-and-mushroom stuffing, sweet potato soufflé, roasted Brussels sprouts, and many, many pies. After all these years, I could make it in my sleep. Ron always gave an amusing and touching before-dinner toast about thankfulness—but now he hesitated about being the one to speak.

  “Why wouldn’t you?” I asked.

  “You’re the expert on gratitude—I’m a doctor. If I give a toast about thankfulness, will you follow up with new medical treatments for diabetes?”

  I laughed. “No. I can’t learn medicine quickly, but everyone can learn to be grateful.”

  We all gathered at our country house—friends and extended family, including Ron’s mom, who had always been my role model for a positive person. I had fun setting the table with jars of flowers and different-size candles, brightly colored napkins, and fancy and simple china patterns mixed together. I’d learned not to serve the soup until Ron gave his toast—it always got cold. But we poured champagne and sparkling cider, and Ron stood up, glass in hand. He started his toast with great warmth, talking about all that he was grateful for. He mentioned everyone at the table and something each person had done that he found special. He thanked his wife—me—for making us all a little more positive this year.

  “So that’s what I’m grateful for, but I’ve also started to wonder who or what I’m grateful to.” He paused and gave a little smile. “Maybe there really is some big guy in the sky who’s arranged all this for me. Or maybe my good luck is just the randomness of the universe. Whichever, I know the cosmos has smiled on me. And I am smiling back, very grateful.”

  There were a lot of “aws” and “aahs” around the table, and as we clicked glasses, I knew I didn’t have to worry if the turkey was dry. What mattered about the holiday had already been handled.

  Later that night, when the dishes were done and the leftovers (a lot of them) neatly piled into Tupperware in the refrigerator, I took out a note card and wrote down Henry Timms’s words: Gratitude at its best is an action.

  So many gratitude-inspired actions made the world better. Hugh Jackman auctioned off his T-shirt and Peter Sagal ran with a blind marathoner. Andrew Jacono performed life-changing surgeries and Mark Liponis (from Canyon Ranch) went to an impoverished corner of Laos and ran weeklong medical clinics. The artist Peter Tunney put up positive-message billboards and Henry Timms created a worldwide day of giving. My husband the doctor helped and healed.

  And me? I’d spent a whole year living gratefully, but what had I actually done on that grander scale? Sure, I participated on a couple of charitable boards and Ron and I made whatever donations we could each year. But in terms of world-changing, earth-shattering, giving-back extravaganzas, I didn’t really compare.

  I had one month left to think about what I could do that would make a difference in my life and my family’s life. I needed to know that gratitude could impact all of us for even longer than a year.

  CHAPTER 14

  Finding Joy

  Grateful to let go of second-guessing myself

  So happy that my sister and I reconnected over kale and chocolate

  Grateful for those good people both long ago and today who know to appreciate every moment of life

  Trying to decide where gratitude might take me this month, I absentmindedly fiddled with a mug that I kept on my desk. It clattered out of my fingers, and as I grabbed for it, I suddenly remembered why I had it in the first place. Ironically, I’d put it on my desk a few months ago to keep in constant sight (though of course I’d stopped seeing it)—a reminder of how gratitude for family can help you find joy and calm even in the midst of despair.

  Now I held the mug carefully in my hands, taking in the pretty teal background and delicate Japanese-influenced white flowers. Based on a painting by a famous artist, the graceful and beguiling image might lead to easy assumptions about the guy who painted it. Surely he wouldn’t be a tormented genius who cut off his ear and spent time in a mental institution. But actually, he was. Vincent van Gogh had painted Almond Blossom while suffering his deepest misery.

  I’d seen the real painting for the first time when Ron and I visited Amsterdam a couple of months earlier. One day of our vacation fell on King’s Day, a national holiday a lot like July Fourth only with hues of orange (Holland’s official color) instead of red, white, and blue. The city teemed with revelers drinking beer, celebrating in the streets, and taking party boats up the canals. Ron and I had fun watching for a while, but merrymaking wasn’t exactly our style. I felt slightly embarrassed that I’d spent weeks planning the trip and not known we’d be there during the most raucous holiday in Holland.

  In silver-linings mode, we made our way through the huge throngs and got to the Van Gogh Museum, famously crowded on even a normal day. But with everyone partying outside, nobody wanted to be inside. Triumph! The museum was deserted. We had the exhibits practically to ourselves.

  “Very grateful that I forgot to check dates and planned our vacation
over King’s Day!” I said to Ron with a grin.

  We strolled through the halls, gazing in close-up awe at famous paintings we’d seen before only on posters. We encountered the Zen-like painting Almond Blossom (the basis for my mug) hanging in an upstairs room. Van Gogh had painted it in 1890, at the end of his life. Seeing the pretty picture on the wall startled—because the genteel, elegant painting was surrounded by two anguished works he had done at about the same time, both filled with loneliness and angst. One showed a wheat field with a reaper, and the other displayed jagged trees cut down by lightning at the sanitorium garden, painted in saturated red. (“Seeing red” was van Gogh’s metaphor for anxiety.)

  In the midst of van Gogh’s gloomy visions of mortality, isolation, and despair, he had found a way to paint this beautifully tranquil and life-affirming picture. And here was the story: His brother, Theo, and his wife had just had a baby whom they named Vincent. Even as he struggled with depression, the original Vincent van Gogh was so touched that they named the baby after him, he wanted to express his gratitude. He painted the blossoms as a sign of hope and thanks.

  In the gift shop afterward, I found myself moved all over again by how an expression of gratitude let van Gogh (briefly) break through his emotional pain. I decided to buy the mug as a reminder of the power of gratitude to change a mood.

  “You could decorate the whole house with that message,” Ron said, pointing out the napkins, plastic plates, pencils, espresso cups, notebooks, eyeglass holders, mouse pads, and salt and pepper shakers with the same Almond Blossom motif. Most people were probably attracted to the pretty design. For me, it seemed like the most beautiful gratitude letter ever created.

  One other story from that trip. The next night, with the city turned quiet again, we strolled down a beautiful canal-side street after a great day. The only downside had been a just-okay dinner that the waiter had taken forever to serve. I’d been deciding among three restaurants and changed the reservation several times, and now I apologized to Ron for having picked the wrong one. Ron told me not to worry, but I couldn’t stop. I felt my anxiety building, that I’d made it a less-than-perfect day. “I should have gone to the one the concierge recommended,” I said querulously. Ron tried again to reassure me, then finally stopped in his tracks.