The Quiet Labor of Gratitude
Character helps us practice gratitude with humility, courage, and generosity
“Gratitude is thankfulness expressed in action … we are each day indebted to thousands.”
— William George Jordan, 1902
Every year, America consecrates a Thursday in late November to give thanks — a gesture as ceremonial as polishing the silver or pardoning a turkey.
The table is set, relatives assemble, and the mood shifts between temporary piety and post-prandial drowsiness. Gratitude, we are told, is the order of the day.
And yet gratitude, properly understood, is less a holiday than a habit — less a feeling summoned on command than a discipline cultivated in the quiet hours between obligations. It is the tacit acknowledgment that none of us walks alone, that our comforts and conveniences rest upon the labor of multitudes whose names we never learned.
“The law…
