I’ve recently been practicing saying ‘Thank you!’ It’s actually been quite a revolution in my life! ‘You’re a bit of a late starter,’ you might now be thinking. ‘I’ve been saying ‘Thank you!’ like a good little boy, or girl, or non-binary person, ever since my parents taught me’. Well, yes exactly. I am not talking about that kind of ‘Thank You’! I am not talking about the perfunctory ‘Thank you’ that really just means following a social rule, doing something because it is what you do. Because we all know how that feels both to give and to receive. Pretty hollow, right? I mean, granted, it is polite. We’d rather say it and have others – particularly our children, I admit – say it than not. It is a box ticked. And there’s a slight satisfaction, or maybe relief, that goes with that. But it is automatic. We do it without really thinking. There’s not much intentionality in it. And by an intentional ‘Thank you’, here, I am referring to a ‘Thank you’ that is really meant, whose utterance is accompanied by a felt experience of gratitude.
How are you feeling now? I am starting to get your goat? Are you going red in the face and shouting at the screen? I mean what am I going on about here? How are we supposed to muster an experience of genuine gratitude every time we say ‘Thank you!’ I am not Mother Teresa! That sounds completely unrealistic. Give me a break!
It is a very fair point and I am certainly not claiming to manage this every time I say ‘Thank you!’ or even most of the time, I am merely trying to do this with increasing frequency, which happily (or unhappily depending on your point of view) is quite easy to achieve at the moment because my baseline was, well, pretty low. Maybe the boat you are in is of a similar construction?
I am now starting to feel a little bit self-conscious. The preceding paragraphs feel like a kind of drum roll and because of that it now appears to be my job to produce something mind-blowing to the accompaniment of a triumphant cymbal clash. I want to lower your expectations a bit. This is just something I find helpful. It may not work for you at all. I am just hoping you might hear something in it that resonates enough for you to be able to go off and find your own way to an intentional thank you.
So, for me, when someone, let’s say a complete stranger whom I have never seen before and whom I will likely never see again, does something for me, like open a door and wait while I walk through it, I try – on a good day – to inject my thank you with some heart by orienting my attention towards some undeniable and mind-bending truths.
- This is a person who is living a finite life, who has only so many seconds to live. They have just used some of their finite time to open a door for little old me, a complete stranger who they will likely never meet again.
- This is a person who will only have a certain amount of energy to burn over the course of their life and, again, they have just used some of this precious energy on opening the door for me.
- This moment will forever bind us together. Come what may, it will never cease to be the case that this person opened the door for me.
- Everything that follows this moment in which our paths have crossed for what – perhaps, or even probably – will be the one and only time will be almost imperceptibly but actually different from what it would have been if the door had not been opened. By giving me this piece of effort and time, this stranger has changed the trajectory of my life…of our lives. On our death beds, we will be able to say truly that neither of us could have done any of it without this moment.
I find that to the extent that all of this is informing my response to the opened door, I can more easily muster a truly intentional ‘Thank you!’ And what is really interesting is that, to the extent that I do this, it seems to me, the recipient of the ‘Thank you’, who may have opened the door quite automatically and mindlessly themselves, is more likely themselves to be shocked out of their robotic application of social rules, and to have a felt experience of their effort being seen and, all of a sudden, a perfunctory, polite door opening becomes a more deliberate, more intentional act after the event has already started. It’s like the moment somehow redeems itself. A distracted smile settles and broadens, eye contact deepens. The whole moment slows down and expands. It feels like a full, rich, multi-dimensional something rather than a flat, empty nothing. Such experiences are fast becoming one of the ‘things’ – the increasing number of ‘things’ – that I live for.
That’s it, that’s my practice and it only remains for me to say, if you have made it to this point in your reading then, sincerely, ‘Thank you!’ because even though you read them after I wrote them, these words bind you and me together just like the opened door. My words have been waiting for you to come along and read them and create a unique moment of meaning. Thank you, truly, for your time and effort. It is not nothing. It matters. It matters to me. Nothing will ever be quite the same again.
Yes To All Of It 