As I drove to the veterinary clinic, a fellow driver let me merge into his lane when he could have blocked me. Then sunlight shot through a break in the clouds and lit up the bare trees along the Potomac. Oh, that’s good, I thought.
As I carried the puppy from the car, a man carrying a box that was making mewing sounds held the door open.
“Thanks,” I said, thinking: That’s good.
A moment later, I’d put the puppy on the floor and three vet technicians had come rushing forward to greet him.
“Who’s a good boy?” they asked, and “Are you a good boy?” and “You are a good boy!” The good boy licked and wriggled with such ecstasy it seemed he would burst with all the love he was getting, and all the love he wanted to return.
This, I thought, is really good.
It was barely 9 in the morning and already I had a long list of mostly very small good things that had happened, or that I’d seen: a smiling, sleepy 6-year-old; the fact that everyone had remembered to pack their lunches the night before, eliminating a source of morning stress; a strong cup of coffee.
There had been lousy moments already, too, and normally they might have been enough to curdle the day: a last-minute spat over homework; a child who overslept and came down grouchy; the fact that we ran out of milk halfway through breakfast, which made the grouchy late arrival even grouchier. Plus, the puppy still hadn’t quite learned the whole don’t-bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you routine, so I had a Band-Aid on my thumb.
Yet because I had been paying close attention to every small positive thing, somehow the negative things lost their power. Making this effort brought a sense of balance — tipping toward happy gratitude — to a very ordinary, unspectacular and mostly overcast day.
Apparently, it is a technique that works not just in quotidian family life, but also in the most grueling and traumatic environments. The Army has taken to using a practice called Hunt the Good Stuff as part of a program designed to fortify soldiers’ emotional and psychological strength. Far from being gooey and touchy-feely, Hunt the Good has made a marked difference for the troops who try it.
“Listen, if you don’t reflect on it you don’t realize that there are good things that happen to you every day,” Brig. Gen. James Pasquarette told NPR, which is where I heard it. He went on: “If you’re not careful, with the stress we put soldiers under, they can really gravitate to the negative things in their world.”
What’s good for the Army turns out also to be good for those of us who do not face hostile insurgents, or dust storms, or prolonged separation from our families — yet who nonetheless may find ourselves bellyaching over the trivial frustrations of civilian life, whether running out of milk or getting a thumb-piercing from an excited puppy.
As the puppy and I were about to drive away from the clinic, a friend called. She was at the supermarket and wondered if I needed anything. I did!
“Yes please,” I said. “Milk.”
Oh, that was good.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].