I would like to begin with a quiet subject by trotting out a brass band, possibly a John Phillips Sousa march. Over the last ten years two incidents periodically pop into my head; haunt me.
The concept: (trumpets, please), one of the best-selling recording artists of all time is Garth Brooks—yes, he outsells the best of them. Brooks was being interviewed by the ubiquitous Ken Burns on a PBS country music retrospective. When Burns asked Brooks the secret of his success, Brooks said he had none, that he did often say to himself, “Thank you, thank you,” and actually repeating it all day long. Wow, do-able enough.
On another occasion, I was half watching the news leafing through the dailies while Oprah was being interviewed on ABC. Midway she launched into an anecdote—sharing, she had been having a hard time of it (difficult to believe, huh?) with an ordeal. Seeking some solace, she telephoned her pal, the award-winning, author-activist Maya Angelou. Angelou suggested this, “Oprah, just say thank you.” Oprah interrupted her with “No-no-no-no, you don’t understand, this terrible thing….” Angelou quietly repeated, “Oprah, just say thank you. Just say thank you.”
I’m always on the prowl for answers—profound solutions that might make the earth move or sound a gong. But these two quiet conversations stuck with me… “Thank you,” all day long?! I’m usually looking for deep, booming wisdom, some morsel that might impress a sage—and then what haunts me—hanging around in my head – is “just say thank you?” So, I did some research. But first:
Certified Sales - Worldwide of The Top Selling Recording Artists:
The Beatles
Garth Brooks
Elvis Presley
Eagles
Led Zeppelin
Michael Jackson
Billy Joel
Elton John
AC/DC
Pink Floyd
And Number 14? Miss Barbra Streisand.
Results from online research ON GRATITUDE:
The subject keeps popping up frequently these days, and I trot it out once more I suspect because the Pandemic changed the mood of a lot of people or instilled the fear of Allah in them. Recently, the New York Times’ Christina Caron requested readers to write in how they practice gratitude. Instantly, the Times got 800 responses. Somebody out there is paying attention. I’m not going to appropriate, but I will quote her queuing up: “Cultivating a grateful outlook and taking a few minutes a day to count our blessings can also reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety, increase self-esteem and improve life satisfaction.” (Ya’ can’t ask for more than that.) Then, she quotes, University of North Carolina psychologist, Dr. Sara Algoe*, “Gratitude seems to be the gift that keeps on giving.”
Gratitude surfing results:
Grateful people have fewer common health problems, headaches, digestion issues, respiratory infections, runny noses, dizziness, and sleep disturbances.
“Gratitude helps one see the bigger picture and become more resilient in the face of adversity,” author Robert Emmons.
“Physiological changes associated with gratitude: reduction in blood pressure and increase in a vagal tone …an index of increased parasympathetic influence on the nervous system,” Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas… “and can conserve energy by slowing heart rate, stimulating digestion, and contribute to overall relaxation.”
College students studied who practiced gratitude over ten weeks reported fewer physical symptoms, headaches, shortness of breath, sore muscles, and nausea, compared to two separate control groups not immersing in the emotion.
“Gratitude made our family closer…and a rich body of research in the field of social sciences has found that gratitude offers significant benefits…we can learn to see the bigger picture and navigate adversity with greater resilience,” Ottawa Life Coach Randi Joy.
Some people have a naturally grateful personality.
Gratitude as an emotion can describe a feeling one gets when receiving a thank-you note.
ROMANCE: Paraphrased from “How to Practice Gratitude” - Mindful, Healthy Mind, Heathy Life. Gratitude plays a role in maintaining romantic relationships, acting as a “booster shot” to remind partners they are valuable and worth holding onto. A thoughtful gesture from a partner might be followed by an increased feeling of indebtedness… In another study, both partners felt more connected and satisfied with the relationship and reported greater ease when voicing future relationship concerns.
“Practicing gratitude correlates with better health outcomes and greater longevity…greater rates of self-reported happiness.” From Life Worth Living, By Yale professors Volf, Croasmun, and McAnnally-Linz – Publisher: Maria Shriver
THE BEST: Behavioral neuroscientist, innovator, author, and adjunct professor, University of Oregon, Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo, studied how to prevent loneliness and restore strong connections—and no longer investigates pharmaceutical solutions. Dr. Cacioppo now promotes a new (?), state of the art approach called GRACE--an acronym for “gratitude, reciprocity, altruism, choice and enjoyment.” Simply put a) be grateful for what you have, b) ask for and offer help to others, and c) make time for fun. In her memoir, Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, Loss, and the Essence of Human Connection, Dr. Cacioppo focuses on the groundbreaking discoveries that she made about love along with her personal story experiencing it. Flatiron Books.
QUOTES ON GRATITUDE:
“Got no checkbooks, got no banks, still I’d like to express my thanks. I got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.” –Irving Berlin song
“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.” –A.A Milne
“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around," –Willie Nelson
“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” –G.K. Chesterton
“Gratitude is a powerful catalyst for happiness. It’s the spark that lights a fire of joy in your soul.” –Amy Collette
“Gratitude turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity...it makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” –Melody Beattie
“‘Enough’ is a feast.” –Buddhist Proverb.
AND ENOUGH HERE, FOR NOW. Something else worth noting.
I had planned to lead off today with a few profuse thank you’s for the complimentary feedback on my last Substack article, “Unkindness: 2023,” until another somewhat shocking email (startling to me) popped up in my in-box, last week.
I had my annual physical and was waiting for the test results from the G.P. when I received the message from one of the country’s top hospitals. To get my test results, I had to identify myself (like select the stop lights in the crosswalk) by going on a site and answering multiple choice questions.
Those queries included some jaw dropping personal information: select my home address, yes, and this: Did you stay at this address in Los Angeles? (Twenty years ago?!) Does your brother own a house in what city, pick one. (He’s a thousand miles away and my youngest sibling hasn’t spoken to me in 13 years*.) More. Did you work, [decades back, may I add] at one of the following corporations? Scream! Many more of the same. I am still reeling. I don’t know exactly how that hospital amassed all those facts. Or is my entire life, as humdrum as it is, out there somewhere for the taking? Or: Is this an example of Artificial Intelligence at its best? Frankly, some blasé friends told me with shrug, it’s par for the course.
On the positive side, a big plus, before beginning the actual annual, my G.P. requested that I fill out a one-page questionnaire to determine how I was feeling: was I depressed and/or lonely? It’s a wise, new 2023 approach.
And so. to begin.
Good News-Bad News. Pro-and-Con. Politics aside, if you’ve looked in before you know my favorite writer is New York Times columnist David Brooks. Recently, Brooks wrote an essay that centered me: “We learned recently that the U. S. economy grew at an annualized 2 percent rate in the first quarter of this year, well above the economists’ expectations of around 1.4 percent……. A direct resent of Biden policies… [Yet] ….74 percent of Americans say the country is on the wrong track. …A recent study found that over the past couple of decades headlines have grown starkly more negative, conveying anger and fear…”
HERE'S THE KICKER: “But the main problem is national psychology. Americans’ satisfaction with their personal lives is nearly four times as higher as their satisfaction with the state of the union. During the Trump era, Americans also lost faith in one another. Those who supported Trump were converted to the gospel of American Carnage, the idea that elite Americans seek to destroy other Americans, that we are on the precipice of disaster. Those who opposed Trump were appalled that their countrymen would support him, disgusted by his rampant immorality, alarmed that their democracy was suddenly in peril.” And then Mr. Brooks wrote, You can’t argue people out of that psychological and moral state with statistics and fact sheets. [Biden] must come up with a 21st century national story that gives people a sense off coherence and belonging—that we are marching in a clear direction toward some concrete set of goals. Good jobs numbers alone don’t heal a brutalized national psyche, and that’s our main problem right now.”
Agree or not, this opinion page is eminently sensible. Wait.
Bad News: my hero, columnist David Brooks wrote a column, June 23, 2023, criticizing the Los Angeles Dodgers for inviting Drag Nuns: The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence–west. That group, at least their sisters (brothers?) has been parading around New York and its environs for decades. I suspect some actual nuns themselves stuff tissues in their mouths to hold back the laughter. These cross dressers are harmless, fun, funny, and have the habit of turning up (wearing nun habits) in odd places, marching in a straight line, since the early 1970s. Don’t you think we need a few more laughs these days?
DYSFUNCTIONED ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION: The mighty New York Times devoted a half page, by two writers, to a new F.D.A. approved, over the counter gel, no prescription necessary, topical gel called Eroxon. The goo treats Erectile Dysfunction in five minutes. I visited three upper west side pharmacies that hadn’t heard of Eroxon — and there was nothing on everywhere-everything Amazon.com. None of my friends could find it in various New York City neighborhood drug stores. I wrote the Times a letter with the above info and this question: Why would you create a desire for a sensitive product unavailable anywhere? They didn’t respond.
GLOBAL WARMING: With every day, near and far, the weather is getting worse and worse. Recently, nearby, was heavy rain and epic flooding the likes we’ve never seen before. Farther away, (hard to fathom) even South Florida is getting drifting dust from the Sahara Desert I think back with regret to the contentious 2000 Bush–Gore election, where candidate Al Gore ran on a Global Platform. Gore won the popular vote. With a complicated aftermath, before you knew it, George Bush was in the White House. What If: Gore’s strong stance on Global Weather if he had been President, what world the world be like today? Preferable, I suspect. At least better than what we’re now dealing with every single day here and around the globe. Wikipedia tells me: In 2001, after his term as vice-president, Gore remained prominent as an author and environmental activist, whose work in climate change activism, in 2007, earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. To name several other activities, Al Gore is founder and current chair of The Climate Reality Project. Mr. Gore is also a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, heading up its climate change solutions group. He now teaches at topnotch universities, and serves on the Board of Directors of World Resources Institute. Do you share the feeling that maybe we missed the boat?
NEXT! NEW SUBJECT:
Let me distill a couple of books for you.
BOOK ONE: The Laws of Human Nature, by best-selling author Robert Greene, a weighty 315-page, 15-chaptered “guide for anyone who wants power, observes power, or wants to arm themselves against power.” Now, who doesn’t?
Greene writes we have covered up our darker impulses with all kinds of rationalizations, making it easier for some people to get away with most unpleasant behavior. We all (all, he writes?) have a “shadow side” to our personalities. Lurking beneath our polite affable exterior is inevitably a dark, shadow side consisting of the insecurities and the aggressive, selfish impulses we repress and carefully conceal from public view. [Don’t tell Mama.]
Greene describes: “The Shadow consists of all the qualities people try to deny about themselves and repress. Buried deep within, it becomes disturbed and active in moments of stress, or when deep wounds and insecurities are triggered. [Help us here, Mr. Greene.] Armed with this knowledge we can anticipate other people’s behavior in moments of stress, and (maybe?) understand their hidden motives and consequently not get dragged in, under, and around by self-destructive tendencies. Know that: “concealing the dark side requires energy…can be draining to always present such a nice, confident front.”
Author Greene spends several paragraphs on Richard Nixon which I’m going to gloss over for fear you and I will become glazed with boredom. To open, Greene attributes the naming of the dark side to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung who originally called the shadow, The Shadow…
Looking at this “shadow” concept from another generation, “…keep in mind that its tendency toward one extreme—materialism, spirituality, adventure, safety—conceals a hidden attraction to the opposite. A generation that came about in the 1960s seemed disinterested in material things…”. Heavy, huh?
BOOK TWO: James Clear wrote a book with one of the most seductive titles in the history of books: Atomic Habits. I read it when it was released and have referred to its premise multiple times. However, I found the theory practical and worth investigating. Fortunately, a reader can grasp the useful concept in the early pages of the book.
Author Clear tells us small habits helped him fulfill his potential. Step by step, the backbone of his theory: cue, craving, response, and reward is much simpler. Regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do, but also the source of incredible power, a component of the system of compound growth.
THE CRUX of Clear’s atomic habits: “….small improvements accumulate into remarkable results…. It was only when folks implemented a system of continuous tiny improvements that they achieved a different outcome. It is the commitment to the process that will determine your progress…”. So, ATOMIC HABITS refers to a little change, a marginal gain, a one percent improvement in minute habits that are part of a larger system.
I left the book knowing, when I had a few seconds here and there, a small amount of time, I could use those moments… to read… to re-read…to research – no matter how few minutes. I came away from the book with useful concept, an approach that’s proved invaluable. If you have a few minutes, don’t shrug then off, use them.
500 billionaires? 500 days of war. THANK YOU, BLOOMBERG BILLIONAIRES INDEX. YOU FASCINATE ME SO.
I ran across a recent study detailing the 500 richest people in the world who, so far in 2023, added $ 852 billion in their wealth—and it is only mid-year. In addition to that number, each lucky lad and lady on the line up made an average of $ 14 billion each day in the past six months. (Footnote in the middle here: it’s their best half-of-the-year since the 2020 COVID slump.) Much more surprising to this humble wage-earner is that there are so many rich folks out there and that some enterprising company indexed them. OUT OF THE BOX/OFF THE WALL: What if we got some of the wealthy ones to agree to be named (all of them would be preferable, but it’s ever possible to get all of anything) on a petition to Mr. Vladimir Putin to please (please!) pick up his marbles and pack off Ukraine, the country he has unilaterally ravaged. Coincidentally now, that number again, the war has been raging for a little over 500 days. Might pressure from 500 billionaires intimate this bully with his obviously overcompensated, small private parts to move on and out? And what a fresh, generous, humanitarian use of power.
SEXPERTS MASTERS & JOHNSON UPDATED. What’s new! NO LONGER SHOCKING, MERELY UNFAIR.
I was around with pioneers in the research and understanding of human sexuality made (shocking?) front page news in the 1960s. Then, in the 1970s, Masters-Johnson published a best-selling book, “Human Sexual Inadequacy.” The couple measured the success of those engaging in heterosexual intercourse. Right now, Andres Heartman is co-founder of a new, modern approach called “Surrogate Partner Collective” which has branched out of the Masters-Johnson to include cisgender and transgender women, nonbinary individuals, as well people with disabilities—struggling with sex and intimacy. However, no men/male clients, gay or straight, need apply. (WHAT? Not fair.) We might add, they are quick to say, only about 5 to 10 percent of cases of surrogate partner therapy involve sex acts. If you want more, or clarity even, because I could use a little myself, search The New York Times, July 13, 2023, Gina Cherelus. Or: CONTACT S.P.C. - info@surrogatepartnercollective.org - (484) 482-8529
MEANWHILE, back to gratitude, it’s never over:
Journaling was suggested multiple times during my surfing. Here are some helpful apps: “Day One,” “Gratitude Plus,” and “Flavors of Gratefulness.”
“Practicing Gratitude Can Be a Gift to Yourself,” by Christina Caron, New York Times, July 11, 2023
Book: The Gratitude Project: How the Science of Thankfulness Can Rewire Our Brains for Resilience, Optimism, and the Greater Good, by Professor, psychologist, author Robert A. Emmons – UC, Davis, CA.
*Psychologist Sara Algoe, University of North Caroline, Chapel Hill. Check out her 2012 paper on Gratitude.
High School Students Study: Lisa Walsh, PhD, PAW Laboratory, UC-Riverside, University of California, Los Angeles
Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Science Director at the GREATER GOOD SCIENCE Center
Online: “How to Practice Gratitude” - Mindful, Healthy Mind, Heathy Life.
Writer Jim Fragale’s 14th SUBSTACK article, “Unkindness: 2023” – nailed it – life as it is today – with a couple of possible solutions. Love has something to do with it. Readers weighed-in on SUBSTACK (170 first day.) “Your best work, ever”…
“Great article…”.“Excellent.” “Kudos.”
Go on Amazon.com. Under BOOKS, type in “James A. Fragale” and all seven books pop up — or click the link above.
Gracie tutti.