Life is busy during
closing at the end of the year, but I wanted to write a quick note about
gratitude – an important thing to keep in mind at this time of year!
We don't say "thank
you" enough. We are part of a culture of entitlement and instant
gratification and many of us struggle to take the time to be appreciative and
grateful for the things other people do to help us along the way. We decided to
try to do something about that through an online initiative a couple weeks ago
at Gustavus.
The Residential Life
department sponsored "Gratitude Week" on our Facebook and Twitter
accounts during the first full week of May. We encouraged students, faculty,
staff and alums to take an opportunity to say THANK YOU to someone who has made
a difference in their life. We "featured" a new group each day in
order for us to recognize as many groups as possible and to open comfortable pathways for the audience to be engaged.
The key to gaining
momentum for this project was to include others who had a larger audience. The
Res Life Facebook page works well for us, but we are a pretty niche market
compared to the general Gustavus Facebook page, the Alumni page or the
Admissions Twitter account. I relied on the willingness of others at the
college to share in the work of expressing gratitude and it paid off. The
response was very good - particularly for the first time with this event and a
still-growing audience on our Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Responses and comments
were wide-ranging and it was evident that alums were some of the first to chime
in about things they appreciated about their Gustavus experience. We had
staff and faculty thanking one another and lots and lots of "likes,"
one of the keys to gauging whether a Facebook message is spreading.
So why be thankful for
others? There's very little - if anything - that we do alone. In "The
Narcissism Epidemic," Dr. Jean Twenge and Dr. W. Keith Campbell argue
that the reliance on others should create in us a need to be grateful. Twenge
and Campbell reference the idea that paying attention to your wider social
networks also off-sets entitlement. An example is given about a speech the
Dalai Lama gave about the myth of independence. The story is of
observations made while listening to the speech. "If you are so
independent, [the Dalai Lama] asked, who grows your food? Who sews your
clothes, builds your house, makes sure that water comes out of your showerhead?
How were you even born? The fact is, he said, we have not done one single thing
alone, without the help of a small army of others, and yet we talk about the
necessity and supremacy of independence. It's completely irrational."
Twenge and Campbell also
talk about the idea that gratitude mitigates entitlement. Twenge & Campbell
reference a study in which people were asked to list the things for which they
were grateful once a week for ten weeks. Compared to the group of people in the
study who did not do this, those who were intentional about being grateful
reported a greater sense of well-being and enjoyed better health. If we
spend more time focusing on being grateful for the things and the people that
we do have, we will spend less time being concerned about the things we do NOT
have or feel we deserve.
We have a strong network
of others on campus who make the work we do possible. The network of others
also make up a large part of our social network. We spend hours a day with
these people - often more than with our own families during certain times of
the year - so our ability to recognize and appreciate others sustains us.
