ignorance of human nature? Let's not expect gratitude. Then, if we get some
occasionally, it will come as a delightful surprise. If we don't get it, we won't be
disturbed.
Here is the first point I am trying to make in this chapter: It is natural for people to forget
to be grateful; so, if we go around expecting gratitude, we are headed straight for a lot of
heartaches.
I know a woman in New York who is always complaining because she is lonely. Not one
of her relatives wants to go near her-and no wonder. If you visit her, she will tell you for
hours what she did for her nieces when they were children: she nursed them through
the measles and the mumps and the whooping-cough; she boarded them for years; she
helped to send one of them through business school, and she made a home for the
other until she got married.
Do the nieces come to see her? Oh, yes, now and then, out of a spirit of duty. But they
dread these visits. They know they will have to sit and listen for hours to half-veiled
reproaches. They will be treated to an endless litany of bitter complaints and self-pitying
sighs. And when this woman can no longer bludgeon, browbeat, or bully her nieces into
coming to see her, she has one of her "spells". She develops a heart attack.
Is the heart attack real? Oh, yes. The doctors say she has "a nervous heart", suffers
from palpitations. But the doctors also say they can do nothing for her-her trouble is
emotional.
What this woman really wants is love and attention. But she calls it "gratitude". And she
will never get gratitude or love, because she demands it. She thinks it's her due.
There are thousands of women like her, women who are ill from "ingratitude", loneliness,
and neglect. They long to be loved; but the only way in this world that they can ever
hope to be loved is to stop asking for it and to start pouring out love without hope of
return.
Does that sound like sheer, impractical, visionary idealism? It isn't. It is just horse sense.
It is a good way for you and me to find the happiness we long for. I know. I have seen it
happen right in my own family. My own mother and father gave for the joy of helping
others. We were poor-always overwhelmed by debts. Yet, poor as we were, my father
and mother always managed to send money every year to an orphans' home-the
Christian Home in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Mother and Father never visited that home.
Probably no one thanked them for their gifts-except by letter-but they were richly repaid,
for they had the joy of helping little children-without wishing for or expecting any
gratitude in return.
After I left home, I would always send Father and Mother a cheque at Christmas and
urge them to indulge in a few luxuries for themselves. But they rarely did. When I came
home a few days before Christmas, Father would tell me of the coal and groceries they
had bought for some "widder woman" in town who had a lot of children and no money to
buy food and fuel. What joy they got out of these gifts-the joy of giving without accepting
anything whatever in return!
I believe my father would almost have qualified for Aristotle's description of the ideal
man-the man most worthy of being happy. "The ideal man," said Aristotle, "takes joy in
doing favours for others; but he feels ashamed to have others do favours for him. For it
is a mark of superiority to confer a kindness; but it is a mark of inferiority to receive it."