The Greatest Virtue… and the First
by Alexander Green

Frustrated with your job? Bored at home? Would you like your days to be filled with excitement, adventure and a strong sense of purpose?

If so, you can volunteer to work alongside my nephew Conrad Schwalbe. Conrad is a U.S. Marine in Iraq. Currently, he spends his days searching for weapons and clearing houses in Ramadi.

Aside from never knowing whether the house he's about to walk into is booby-trapped - he's already lost several members of his company - there are other inconveniences. Like improvised explosive devices. And snipers.

Then there are the minor inconveniences: missing several meals in a row, staying up for more than a day at a time, going more than a week without a shower, and getting woken at night by mortars and gunfire.

Don't worry. My intention is not to drag anyone into an argument about the war in Iraq. My message today is about gratitude. More than two thousand years ago, Cicero called it "not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others."

Psychologists say it's virtually impossible to feel grateful and unhappy at the same time.

Gratitude is usually generated in one of two ways. One, by feeling a genuine appreciation for the life that you were given and, two, by making a conscious decision to practice looking at what's right in your life rather than focusing on what's missing.

I'm thankful I don't spend my days knocking on doors in Ramadi, for example. Beyond the American mission in Iraq, I'm grateful for all the men and women in uniform who are willing to lay down their lives for us. George Orwell was right when he said we sleep peaceably at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.

Of course, if you have nothing more than good health and the love and affection of your family, you have much to be grateful for. But take a moment, too, to marvel at how fortunate you are just to have been born in the modern era.

Your ancestors four generations removed would marvel at contemporary life: Unlimited food at affordable prices… plagues that killed millions - polio, smallpox, measles, rickets - all but eradicated… the end of backbreaking physical toil for most wage earners… the advent of instantaneous global communication and same-day travel to distant cities… mass home ownership with central heat and air and limitless modern conveniences… senior citizens cared for financially and medically, ending the fear of impoverished old age.

Let's not forget, too, how advances in medical technology and nutrition have created the greatest human accomplishment of all time - the near doubling of the average lifespan over the last hundred years. (At the beginning of the twentieth century, the average American lived just 41 years.)

Please don't kid yourself that things were really better in "the good old days." As I once heard an historian remark, "If you really believe life was better a couple hundred years ago, I have just one word for you - dentistry."

Let's appreciate, too, the many political freedoms - denied to millions around the world - that we enjoy today: freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and freedom from conscription, among others.

Of course, it is nothing less than astonishing that you're sitting here reading this at all.

In "A Short History of Nearly Everything," Bill Bryson writes that "you have been extremely - make that miraculously - fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you."

Meditate on that for a moment. And recognize that the odds against you being here are astronomically large. Then be grateful…

Gratitude makes you feel like you have enough. Ingratitude leaves us in a state of deprivation in which we are always looking for something else.

Don't just feel grateful, however. Do something about it. As William Arthur Ward once said, "Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it."

Let your co-workers know, in subtle ways, that you enjoy working with them. Show your friends that you don't take their companionship for granted. Let your partner know how you really feel.

Who knows? You may be surprised to find out what they think about you. Doing this is a good thing, by the way. Medical studies consistently show that people who express gratitude regularly are happier, healthier and less susceptible to depression.

So find a moment to appreciate your incredible good fortune… and let the people around you know how you feel.

As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote 2000 years ago:

If you look to others for fulfillment,
you will never truly be fulfilled.
If your happiness depends on money,
you will never be happy with yourself.
Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.

Carpe Diem,

Alex

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