Proverbs 15:13 tells us, “A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance….” Two verses later, we read, “[H]e that is of a merry heart hath a continual feast.”

For a couple of days this week, my heart was anything but merry, and doubtless my face and demeanor matched my mood. I was in a funk brought on by work problems, difficulties with a granddaughter, and that often unrecognized spoilsport of emotion and thought, fatigue. Because I am sometimes slow on the uptake, nearly 30 hours passed before I remembered to go to my interior medicine cabinet and take a dose of that elixir I so frequently recommend to others both in print and in person: Gratitude.

There I was, three o’clock in the morning, sitting on my front porch with a first cup of coffee and worries tumbling around inside my head when I silently spoke the short prayer with which I typically kick off my mornings, “Thank you, Lord, for another day.” I usually follow up with a few promises to help make it a good one, but for whatever reason, on this particular morning that customary invocation jumpstarted a thanksgiving list: my children, their spouses, and my grandchildren; the woman I married, now dead 22 years, who bore those children and loved me despite my flaws; my treasured books; the fact that I have long earned a living doing work I loved.

That brief slice of time, less than a minute long, brushed away my clouds and fog, bringing, if not a merry heart, a smile.

Near the end of Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town,” when the spirit of the recently deceased Emily, young wife and mother, leaves the graveyard to revisit her 12th birthday, she quickly comprehends how blind we humans can be to the beauty, tenderness, and joys of life. To her mother, who can’t see or hear the spirit-Emily, she says, “Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me … just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.” Those italics belong to the playwright.

A few lines later, when she asks the Stage Manager to take her back to her gravesite, Emily first says farewell to all those things she’d taken for granted in life – clocks ticking, Mama’s sunflowers, food and coffee and more – then concludes, “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Perhaps, but it’s our efforts, however feeble, to recognize this wonder that breed gratitude, which in turn can deliver that merry heart. Wilder’s “Our Town” attempts to snatch the blindfold from the eyes of his audience.

Editor and writer Hannah White points us to writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau as examples of authors who found strength and hope, and yes, a feast, in recognizing gratitude and practicing thanksgiving. She quotes lines taken from one of Thoreau’s letters: “I am grateful for what I am and have. … It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite – only a sense of existence. … O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.”

White’s article also provides a link to the 2017 article, “How Gratitude Changes You and Your Brain,” by Joshua Brown and Joel Wong. These two Indiana University professors conducted experiments and studied those of other researchers that reveal the power of gratitude to help ease certain mental and emotional troubles. In their own tests, they asked students who were seeking mental health counseling to write a weekly letter of gratitude to people who had left a good mark on their lives. The improvements in that group compared to control groups encouraged Brown and Wong to suggest that mental health counselors incorporate this tactic into their practices.

Through these studies they concluded that “people who consciously count their blessings tend to be happier and less depressed.”

A merry heart does not preclude worry, suffering, or grief. It’s no charm against ill fortune. Instead, it’s tough and resilient. It springs from gratitude, and brings the strength and courage to help us move forward in times of distress and tribulation.

Twentieth-century motivational speaker William Arthur Ward was famed for the thousands of epigrams he wrote and published. Many had to do with gratitude, one of which reminds us of its easy accessibility: “God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say thank you?”

Another describes in one sentence some of the benefits in giving thanks: “Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.”

Gratitude is the metronome that keeps the merry heart beating.

—

This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Unsplash