welcome
 

*
Emmons on Chesterton

from
THANKS! 
How the New Science of Gratitude
Can Make You Happier
by
Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D.
 
Chapter 2: Gratitude and the Psyche (pp. 19ff.)
 
                                    I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought,
                                    and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
                                                                                                            --G. K. Chesterton
 
One of the most prolific writers of the past century, G. K. Chesterton produced nearly a hundred books on the genres of faith and philosophy, mystery, biography, poetry, and social and political commentary. In the course of his lifetime, Chesterton contributed to two hundred other books, wrote over four thousand newspaper essays, including thirty years’ worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News, and thirteen years of weekly columns for the Daily News, and, at the same time, edited his own newspaper, G. K.’s Weekly.
Chesterton was a deep thinker and had a knack for expressing profound truths simply and making simple observations sound profound. One commentator wrote that Chesterton said something about everything and said it better than anybody else. But to those who knew Chesterton, eve more notable than his sharp intellect was his habitually positive demeanor. While we might expect that his heavy workload would render him exhausted, Chesterton’s friends and acquaintances consistently described him as “exuberant” and “exhilarated” by life. To what were these characteristics attributed?
To think of Chesterton, one commentator wrote, is to “think of gratitude.” Gratitude and a sense of wonder and appreciation for life were consistently and constantly expressed in his life and in his writings. He delighted in the ordinary and was surprised and awed by his own existence and the existence of all else. Throughout his life, he set a conscious goal of remaining childlike in his sense of wonder and vowed not to succumb to the monotony and boredom that saps so many lives of joy and purpose. This sense of wonder at the ordinary is aptly illustrated in this letter to his fiancée, Frances, where he is apologizing for an ink stain on the letter.
 
I like the Cyclostyle ink, it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me; the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people. . . . When we call a man “manly” or a woman “womanly” we touch the deepest philosophy.
 
So absorbed was he in the present moment, it was said that Chesterton lived in an almost mystical state of exaltation. Present-mindedness came at the cost of absent-mindedness, however, and his absent-mindedness was legendary. He rarely knew where he was supposed to be at any given hour. He did most of his writing in train stations, since he usually missed the train he was supposed to catch. He once hailed a cab to take him to an address that turned out to be across the street. On another occasion, he was sipping wine with his sister-in-law in a wine shop in London when he suddenly remembered that he was shortly due to be giving a lecture in another town. Once he sent a telegram to his wife that read: “Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I be?”
No doubt his ability to get into the flow of life, a state marked by total absorption and detachment from one’s surroundings, contributed to his success as a writer and to his joyous affirmation of life. Many psychologists would argue that Chesterton was simply a naturally happy and engaged person, a man who won the genetic lottery at birth and whose brain was set up to experience pleasure and joy in even the most mundane surroundings. But there was another factor. In his best-known book, Orthodoxy, Chesterton wrote, “The test of all happiness is gratitude. Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he puts in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents. . . . Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?” In his autobiography, published the year of his death, he summarized his life’s writings in saying that gratitude “if not the doctrine I have always taught, is the doctrine I should have always liked to teach.” One is never lacking in opportunities to be happy, according to Chesterton, because around every corner is another gift waiting to surprise us, and it will surprise us is we can achieve control over our natural tendencies to make comparisons, to take things for granted, and to feel entitled.
Chesterton was raised without religious faith, yet he was filled with gratitude for his own life, for love, for beauty, for all that is. He was filled with an enormous sense of thankfulness and enormous need for someone or something to thank. How can one be thankful, he wondered, unless there is someone to thank? This mystery became the fundamental philosophical riddle of his life and ultimately led to his conversion to Catholicism at age 48.
 
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A prevailing sentiment in both classical and popular writings on happiness is that an effective approach for maximizing one’s contentment is to be consciously grateful for one’s blessings. The great twentieth-century humanitarian, physician, theologian and Nobel Peace Prize-winner, Albert Schweitzer, called gratitude “the secret to life.” In one particular sermon he summarized his position by stating that “the greatest thing is to give thanks for everything. He who has learned this knows what it means to live. He has penetrated the whole mystery of life: giving thanks for everything.” From ancient scriptures to modern devotional writers, counting one’s blessings is frequently recommended as a strategy to improve one’s life. . .
. . . .As an empirically minded scientist, I yearned to put these and other pronouncements on the importance and power of gratitude to the empirical test. I was thus led to probe the happiness inducing nature of gratitude and to ask the following questions: Does the systematic counting of one’s blessings impact happiness and well-being? If it does, why, in what ways, and for how long? Is gratitude simply an adaptation-enhancer in bad circumstances and adaptation-delayer in good ones, or does it have permanent effect that actually moves the overall range of the set-point [for happiness]? . . .
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