“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”
Mark Twain
There is a Yiddish proverb saying that you cannot put ‘thank-you’ in your pocket. True, you cannot, but not everything revolves around something in your pocket. There are, however, things that you can put in your heart, such as gratitude! Oh my goodness, at times I wonder if gratitude is something that is extremely expensive, because so many people struggle to give honest gratitude. Yes, you will hear the occasional “Thank You”, but that could just as well have been a sneeze… Plastic “thank yous” and plastic smiles are abundant. Mark Twain, in our opening quotation, made it clear that humans tend to repay a good deed, with a bite of the hand that dished out that good deed.
How many of us truly live a life of gratitude, true gratitude, without biting the hand that offers that which is good? I certainly do, and most certainly not the type of gratitude Samuel Johnson refers to. He says that there are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because the obligation is a pain. To get back to our “Thank You”, and this relates to Johnsons’ view, if you want to show your false gratitude from a platform of obligation, rather than from a platform of true (deeply felt) appreciation, then rather not thank me at all. I will then much rather feed a starving dog than an ungrateful human.
You may wonder – if you are a frequent reader of my blog – if what I am saying is not in contrast to what I always preach, namely, never to do something as a means to an end (receiving gratitude), but rather as an end in itself (doing the good deed). Indeed, I will never do good deeds for the purpose of accumulating titbits of gratitude. The showing of gratitude or none at all, does not enrich my life at all. What it does, is simply to reveal your character to me, and that is that.
Do also keep in mind, gratitude is not only that which we express towards goods we receive from other people. No, I also (and predominantly) refer to the gratitude we ought to foster towards life. The gratitude for having the capacity of speech and sight and hearing, for having a life to live and for having loved ones. These are the things we so often take for granted. Some consider gratitude an exquisite form of courtesy, but I want to end today with the very true words of Ruth Benedict, who said that humanities' indebtedness... is not a virtue; repayment is. Virtue begins when humanity dedicates itself actively to the job of gratitude. So, rethink your sense of entitlement to everything and start showing some TRUE gratitude.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
William Wordsworth
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