Thoughts on Thanks

… bringing our expressions of gratitude to life.

Photo Cliff Scholz

A couple years ago, I started reminding myself when thanking people to include the name of the person I’m thanking. For example: “Thank you, Mary!” or “Thank you, Fred!”

I noticed that just adding the person’s name to an expression of thanks and gratitude seems to amplify its depth and impact. Since then I have thought a lot about why this is so.

At first I thought: “Wow, this is great! All I have to do is include the name of the person I’m thanking and it seems to make a big difference in how it lands.”

If I don’t know the name of a person, and sometimes even if I do, I’ll sometimes personalize the thanks with things like, “Thanks so much for your help. You saved me a lot of time looking for this.”

Over time, I decided that part of what’s happening with this is that by including a person’s name or further personalizing the expression in some other way that connects, it subtly shifts the focus so that it becomes more clear that when I’m thanking someone for a gift, an act of service or kindness, a compliment or anything else, it’s not just the gift or the action I’m grateful for, I’m also grateful for the person bringing these things to me, and probably also for my relationship with that person. Sure, a homemade cake may have just been presented to me, and that’s amazing, but what’s also amazing is the person who took the time to bake it.

See the shift? Just by adding the person’s name to my expression of thanks, “Wow! Thank you for the cake, Mary!” it seems to bring a fuller picture of the total interaction into focus.

Gratitude is a primary practice of mindful living. It’s bigger than just thanking people, but thanking people and feeling gratitude for others is definitely part of it.

For me, the point of personalizing my expressions of gratitude in any of these ways is to de-automate the social interaction. I don’t want to just say words, I want them to come from a place that feels real and if possible to land in a way that feels real. The point is to be more deeply human at the moment I’m giving thanks. And there’s a lot more than just words that go into these interactions. There’s eye contact, facial expressions, body posture and so on. But the biggest thing is that all of these have to come from an authentic inner sense of gratitude.

In the book, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy by noted deep ecology teacher Joanna Macy and co-author Chris Johnstone, a core practice is, “Begin with gratitude.”

There’s good reason why Joanna Macy made gratitude one of her central teachings: It simply changes everything.

There has always been a risk as we go through life of slipping into “reaction mode” or focusing on everything that’s wrong, sometimes even falling into feelings of overwhelm. It’s also easy to become somewhat robotic in our interactions with others. Gratitude can help change these things. And that may be increasingly important today given our exposure to technologies that literally encourage us to “react” and to mindlessly scroll. Not to mention the longstanding pattern of stopping at lights, standing in lines, punching in at clocks, insert-tap-swipe at the checkout, and so on. We interact with machines so much it starts to seep into our bones. It’s almost like somebody somewhere wants us to become more machine-like, more programmable, more mindless and less human. The thing to remember is, the organism that invented the robot always had a bit of the robot inside. You could say that robots are made in the image of their creators. Question is: How much of that tendency do we really want to allow in ourselves?

Tools don’t just shape the world, they shape people. Even with the simple tools that make our work easier, excessive use of them can be dehumanizing. This is probably part of the idea of setting aside a day of rest one day a week to let go of those tools. Empowering as our technologies are, there can be a shadow side to even the simplest tools. For example, in my last post I was exalting the praises of the mattock, but if one engages with such a thing too long, there’s a risk that the mindset of wood, steel and mechanical advantage can start to creep into a person’s whole being, body and mind. Next thing you know, the tool is less an extension of a person than the person is an extension of the tool. A dehumanizing, instrumental approach to the living body can result, as if one’s own body is simply a vehicle for the accomplishment of tasks. Likewise, the instrumental mindset could start getting projected outward: we might start thinking of people in terms of their leverage and uses. Thing is, we’re people. We’re a lot bigger than that.

So how about these other technologies we’re interacting with, the programs and simulations and images and all the rest? What if we find ourselves saying “thank you” because it’s part of our “social programming”? And of course this could happen without computers to help robotify and automate us, because, once again, the robotic tendency was already inside humanity before robots were even invented.

Thing is, it’s also important to remember that automated human capacities — our habits, routines, muscle memory — are not really a bad thing. It’s more about what’s serving what. Is the guitarist’s “automated” capacity to execute a scale on a fretboard a bad thing? Not if the result is live, expressive music. Likewise, I’m not really thinking about my fingers on the computer keyboard right now. I’m thinking about ideas. I rely on the automated movements of my hands to help encode my thoughts as words.

And so likewise, one could say that an automatic “thank you” is better than no thanks at all, and that’s usually true. Problem is, if our expressions of gratitude become excessively rote and repetitive, over time they might add up to something that in net effect is very close to no real thanks at all. It’s much the same as if a piece of music gets so much play there’s no music left in it. If the expression of thanks is coming from a place that is mostly robotic and habitual, if I’m just following a social protocol the way computers follow their protocols, how is that going to connect with other human beings on the level of their aliveness? And if my expression of thanks is not connecting with others on the level of their aliveness, then what’s the point? Isn’t that the goal — to connect with others on the level of their aliveness?

This is the reason all this is worth talking about. It’s really about how to make the most of these opportunities to be human. And I’ve found that it helps strengthen that living connection when I say, for example: “Thank you, Bill!” rather than just: “Thank you!” Or when I find some way to personalize and bring life to my expressions of gratitude in whatever ways I can that feel right in the moment.

So, I think a big part of the magic in using people’s names when communicating with them is that it’s a reminder to me. It’s a reminder that I’m interacting with a specific, living person, a person who likely has made my life better, richer, more fun, more abundant, more meaningful, less painful or more enlightened. In other words, saying the name of the person to whom I am expressing gratitude helps me connect with my own aliveness. And when I speak from a place of aliveness, a place of heart, a place of authenticity and connection, there’s a better chance it will land in these places with others.

Begin with gratitude, though. That’s the important thing. I think Joanna Macy got that right.