Practical advice from one Charles Dickens in “Sketches by Boz”: “Reflect upon your present blessings—of which every man has many—not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.” G.K. Chesterton took a different tack—gratitude is “the highest form of thought.” Tolstoy took it a step further: You can infer from his work that he thought the moments in which we feel the greatest thankfulness are those in which we are most noble.
Don’t be embarrassed by talk of gratitude this weekend, or think it rote or corny. Feel thankful enough long enough and it amounts to a stance toward life, a good one. I did nothing to earn the snow-capped mountain on the horizon and yet there it is, filling my eyes and soul with wonder. Thank you, God. Or thank you, mystery. But thank you.
What are you thankful for this year? We’ll start big and go small, knowing small is big too.
Big is from Harvard University political scientist Graham Allison, who wrote to me this week to share three reasons to give thanks this Thanksgiving: “80, 80, and 9.”
Many readers will know what these numbers signify, remarkable achievements that most of us have enjoyed all our lives.
The first 80: “Since Japan surrendered in September, 1945, the world has lived in the longest peace—the longest period without Great Power war—since the Roman Empire.”
“The second 80 is the answer to the question: how many years has it been since nuclear weapons were used in war? Had anyone been asked to bet about this in 1950 or 1960, they could have gotten thousand-to-one odds against this outcome.”
The 9, he says, may be the most incredible of all. “How many states have nuclear arsenals?” We rightly fear nuclear proliferation, and yet “amazing grace and good fortune,” and admirable postwar statecraft, “actually bent the arc of history.”
More than a hundred nations have the resources to build nuclear weapons, Mr. Allison says. Instead they’ve chosen to rely on “the security guarantees of others.” This is wonderful and “historically unnatural.”
Much of what made this happen is being “eroded.”
But for now and just a moment . . . think of the genius that went into making 80, 80 and 9. And be grateful. (The thinking of Mr. Allison and his collaborator, James A. Winnefeld, Jr., on how to renew progress, is in the latest issue of “Foreign Affairs.”)
I asked some friends what they personally found themselves most thankful for this year. Two shot immediate replies.
One, a professor, aged 70, said his thoughts continually returned to a doctor’s genius. “In 2012 I suddenly lost vision in one eye because of a detached retina. After restoring my sight, a surgeon noticed a tiny retinal tear in my other eye and fixed it with a laser. If it were not for medical advances, I probably would be blind.” He can’t stop thinking how grateful he is “for all modern medicine—antibiotics, vaccines, surgical technology, all the rest.”
Another friend, a think tanker in the same age group, said, “Advances in cancer treatment and a wonderful doctor, which have kept my father-in-law alive in a situation which in generations past would have likely produced a quick and negative outcome.”
Here’s to the doctors and nurses and scientists. Thanks, too, to Tatiana Schlossberg for her cool, brave, brilliant reporting on her struggle with cancer, in the New Yorker. She especially toasts nurses: “Nurses should take over.” They should.
My friend Lloyd the lawyer, in his sixties, cited three special objects of gratitude this year: old college friends who show how they care through their candor, his Shabbat morning bible study group—“they are sharp, warm and skeptical”—and what happens when he walks the dogs each day just before dawn on the Westchester shore. He sees “the sun creep over the Long Island sound.” It feels like “the sweep and glory of Creation.”
I’m grateful I have work, that I get to be a writer in America, that I have been able to earn my living that way and know so many of my readers. I have met them traveling the country the past 35 years. We talk at speeches, conferences, book events, dinners, and I know who they are: They are the people who make America work. They’re the doctor on the local hospital board, the businesswoman helping local education, the volunteers in the group that helps new mothers, the store owners heading the downtown revitalization effort. Sometimes they disagree with me on politics but we’re kind of old friends, we came up together, and they forgive me.
They make America live each day. I am a writer in America and I get to be with them, hear from them. Isn’t it corny to say this moves me? But this moves me.
Quickly:
I am grateful for this moment: A small, thrown-together dinner of old friends (thank you, you are precious to me) and, near the end, my friend Richard and I creep into the TV room to catch the end of game three of the World Series. We watched silently and then he said, softly, “It’s a privilege to be here in the age of Ohtani.” I said, oh my gosh, that’s the word, privilege. And at that moment I remembered an older friend no longer with us whom I’d always envied because, as a boy, he’d go to Yankee Stadium and see Joe DiMaggio play. “The great DiMaggio . . . who does all things perfectly,” as Hemingway put it. My late friend always told me it wasn’t just DiMaggio’s hitting, it was his fielding, “fluid, like liquid.”
And there in the TV room, in game three, I realized: I have my Joltin’ Joe. Shohei Ohtani, I am grateful for you.
I am grateful for a little blond boy, just over a year old with a funny, grave face. There is a thing about him, a courtesy, or what I read as courtesy. When he meets adults he stares at them and takes them in, then kindly smiles and gurgles and lets them pat him, ruffle his hair, and take his face in their hands.
Then he returns to the thoughts that really occupy his mind: The ball is a ball and is round. What is round? He stares at it in his hands. But he’s so patient in how he allows you to fuss, as all around him do.
There are studies that say you get happier as you get older, and from what I observe and experience, especially this year, it’s true. The great decisions, which are all on some level great gambles—the profession, the partner, the people and places you seek—have been made, the results are in. No one gets it wholly right, but you survey the field of your life and cock your head. And you confide more because you know your fellow travelers—the friend who had to struggle with professional disappointments she now understands are final, or with personal ones that cannot be changed. But all the compensations, all the progress anyway.
All the grownups know what John F. Kennedy said, in words that are famous because they’re what everyone has always said and been right: “Life is unfair.” And still it is beautiful, magnificent. You want to take its face in your hands.