Open the door and see all the things to be thankful for…

‘TWAS the night before Thanksgiving, 1987, when roughly everyone in America was trying to be somewhere else. I was trying to get from San Diego to Detroit on one of the busiest travel days of the year. The company meeting I was attending ended around 5:00 p.m. (PST). Fortunately, the convention center in San Diego is not far from the airport, so I was sure I could make my 6:20 flight.

I will spare you the full saga: taxis, long lines everywhere. I’ll just say that by the time I walked through my own front door, it was about two in the morning, thanks to a three-hour time change and a 30-degree drop in temperature that gave me the sensation of being robbed and left out in the cold. I was rumpled and smelled faintly of exhaustion. And here’s the thing I remember most. I have never been so grateful for a doorknob.

Not the turkey, not the pie, not the family snug in their beds. The doorknob. The turning of it. The warm, ordinary, gloriously unremarkable inside of my own house.

I think about that night a lot, because it taught me something that only experience can teach. We are terrible at noticing what’s good until it’s been briefly taken away. Psychologists call the underlying problem hedonic adaptation, which is a fancy way of saying we get used to everything. You can want something so badly you can taste it, and six months after you get it, you can’t remember what the fuss was about. Your own place, your bed, your kitchen, even your front door. They sit there all year being wonderful, and we walk past them without a second glance.

Then Thanksgiving rolls around, and we’re asked to be thankful on cue. We go around the table. “Family.” “Health.” “Football.” Everyone nods. Nobody’s lying, exactly. We just haven’t looked up in a while. The words are true, but they slide off like an egg off a Teflon pan. Our brains, bless them, are built like nervous golden retrievers, always on alert for trouble, barking at the mailman, while the full food bowl goes unremarked.

The good news is you don’t need a miserable trip and a 2 a.m. arrival to feel it. You can borrow a little of that doorknob feeling on purpose, with practices so small they barely count as effort.

Imagine something gone, just for a second. Remember power failures? No heat on a cold morning. No coffee maker. A quick squint at life without it, and suddenly the thing you were grumbling about isn’t so tragic.

Try three good things. At the end of the day, name three things that went right, and why. Not “the sunrise was majestic.” Real ones. “The hardware store guy knew exactly which weird little washer I needed.” “The soup was even better the second day.” “Nobody asked me to join a committee.” The “why” is the secret ingredient, because it usually turns out somebody else was involved, and it’s nice to be reminded you’re not doing this whole life thing alone.

Be specific. “I’m grateful for my family” is a greeting card. “I’m grateful that somebody left the porch light on” is a story, and stories stick.

And say thank you, out loud or in writing. Send the text. Tell the neighbor who brought your trash cans back up the driveway that you noticed. People rarely get thanked for the small stuff, and when they do, they glow like a toaster oven.

None of this means pretending life is easy. Gratitude isn’t a magic wand, and if someone tells you to “just be thankful” during a genuinely rotten week, you’re allowed to give them a look. The good and the hard can sit at the same table, passing the rolls. You can be worn out and thankful for your people. You can be worried and thankful for the pie.

So this Thanksgiving, when the dreaded go-around-the-table moment arrives, skip the greeting-card version. Tell a small, true story instead. The stranger who let you merge. The kid who said something so funny you had to leave the room. The leftovers you’re already looking forward to at 11 p.m. in your socks.

And keep it up after the pie is gone. A day of thanks is a fine tradition. A habit of noticing is a better one. There’s a whole lot of good stuff in the room already, and one of them is a doorknob.

Now, pass the gravy.
Contact Jerry at jerrygervase@yahoo.com