Summer, 1990. A warm Tokyo evening. I am walking the streets of the Azabu Juban district with Donald Richie. He is the world’s leading authority on Japanese cinema and an accomplished essayist and novelist. I have sought him out because now, at age thirty, I think I know what I want from life: to write something, someday, as good as The Inland Sea.
In the 1960s, Richie made a series of voyages through the islands of Japan’s Seto Naikai, the narrow, strait-like sea that separates Japan’s three main land masses. Today, the sea’s islands and villages are succumbing to sterile modernity, but in the 1960s they remained backwaters, still connected to Japan’s deep past and primordial values. “These islands are extraordinarily beautiful, and a part of their beauty is that it is passing,” he wrote. “And so I want to go to the font of that humanity, to this still and backward place where people live better than anywhere else because they live according to their own natures.” Richie chronicled encounters with priests and fishermen and lepers, schoolchildren and grandmothers and bureaucrats and barmaids, and then wove their lightly fictionalized stories together to produce a work of luminous prose and profound human insight. Published in 1971, when Richie was in his forties, the book quickly attained the stature of a classic. Meanwhile, Richie chronicled Japan’s rebirth from postwar ashes, became the doyen of his field, befriended the artistic luminaries of three generations, wrote novels and newspaper columns and everything in between, lectured around the world, and received prizes and distinctions.
So, walking with him in Tokyo, I am startled when this extraordinarily accomplished man speaks of having experienced midlife crisis. Meaning what? “Midlife crisis begins sometime in your forties,” he replies, “when you look at your life and think, Is this all? And it ends about ten years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually, this is pretty good.”
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Gratitude is healthy. Studies find it increases optimism, happiness, and physical wellbeing. It seems to reduce doctor visits and sleeplessness. You can make people feel and function better by getting them to write thank-you letters to those who have made a difference in their lives. If gratitude were a pill, every doctor would prescribe it.
Gratitude is also virtuous. Religions all over the world call upon their adherents to thank God for our blessings (and even for our misfortunes), and philosophers from ancient times have placed thankfulness at the foundation of ethics. “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others,” said the Roman philosopher Cicero.
Gratitude is also indispensable. Humans’ success as a species depends on our ability to track and repay the help we receive from countless others, near and far. Our unique capacity for socially organized gratitude allows us to cooperate on a global scale, a feat no other animal comes close to matching. Without gratitude, human life would be nasty, brutish, and short.
When I was in the trough of the happiness curve, the bedevilment that troubled me most was chronic ingratitude. I knew I should be grateful, I tried to be grateful, if you had asked me I would have said of course I’m grateful; but I had trouble feeling grateful. My inner critics, who delighted in pestering me about what was wrong with me and my life, wouldn’t be shooed away more than briefly by any blessing or admonition. My morale sank to its lowest when I feared that my gratitude deficit might be permanent.
My story would make a better screenplay if I had had an epiphany, discovered a new purpose, got religion, or found a breakthrough therapy, but I didn’t. Nor did I quit my job, cheat on Michael, succumb to depression, or buy a red sports car. I mainly went with Plan A, also known as muddling through. Like most people at the bottom of the curve, I set my face and determined to slog forward and stay on track. In hindsight, it would have been a big relief to have known about the geography of the valley I was in, but I didn’t know. I did, though, remember Richie’s words, and they helped. If this extraordinary man could lose but then recover gratitude, then so could I!
He turned out to be exactly right. In my early fifties, the critics’ voices faded. I don’t recall any sudden change, but at some point I noticed that I was noticing them less. On more and more days, I woke up without hearing them. Each year, gradually but discernibly, I seem to be more content doing whatever I do that day, instead of beating up on myself for whatever it is I haven’t done and might never do. Each year, just as the scholarship predicts, my attention seems more drawn to the positive. In Laura Carstensen’s evocative phrase, I seem to be growing “more attuned to the sweetness of life than to its bitterness.” I’m not sure if I am growing wiser, and I don’t walk around in a state of bliss (and wouldn’t want to), but I am confident that the undertow has turned. My boat may be battered and the hourglass is emptying, but the river is helping me now.
If I had to explain the upside of the U in just three words, the words I would use are these: Gratitude comes easier. That is the hidden gift of the happiness curve.
It is worth the wait.