Irish Stew and Thanks Be To God

(and my wife)

This is a story of moving from feeling positive emotions for a delicious Irish Stew to gratitude expressed to the cook (and to God?) and then to new positive emotions for having done that.

This real-life story is an example of the way that expressing gratitude to a person who created some positive emotions can double (or triple) the positive emotions for everybody.  This process is strangely foreign to many of us. 

The important need is first to notice a comment or an event that made us feel some sort of positive emotions in the first place. Incidentally, positive emotions can include:  joy, contentment, delight, gratitude, serenity, relieved/relief, hope, worthwhile, interested, amusement (laughter), pride, inspired, love, awe, energized, inspired, passionate, satisfied, able, valued, appreciated, or competence.  

As we began a watch for positive emotions over the course of a normal day, we can begin to understand the myriad of comments from people and events of daily life that give us feelings of joy, or contentment or relief for instance.  Furthermore we will have started a listing of events worth expressing gratitude to somebody.

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The other evening I was in the kitchen covering the remaining Irish Stew that my wife had cooked for dinner.  The carrots, red potatoes, cabbage, and corned beef, all looked so good.  It made me smile with delight.  I could taste that great stew again in my mind.   Since I was working on my gratitude project for my Collegium class I thought that I would try the next step and tell my wife what it was that I felt and thank her again for the delicious dinner. 

As I told my wife what just happened during my kitchen clean-up, she smiled, thanked me for telling the little story (and for thanking her again) and then she made a humorous remark about gas.  We laughed together.  

As I thought about the whole incident a bit later, what first came to my mind was how glad I was that I had taken that extra two minutes to tell (with gratitude) the “covering the Irish Stew” story to my wife. 

In other words, thinking about what I had done to share the clean-up story and thank my wife, actually seemed to have been a stronger positive emotion event than just thinking about the good Irish Stew in the first place.  Furthermore, it made my wife feel pleased as well and gave us a focus for a shared laugh.

What if we were to do the same thing with God as something emotionally positive happens in life?   If we stop, and right then descriptively thank God for that event, can that expressed gratitude to God event becomes a more important positive memory than the original event that caused us “to give thanks to God” in the first place?  Try it and see?

Bruce