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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
In gratitude for your good fortune, you must render in return some sacrifice of your own life for other life.
– Albert SchweitzerElizabeth Bartlett, professor of political science at a Midwestern university, received a heart transplant at the age of 42. All other options for treating her life-threatening chronic tachycardia (irregular heartbeat) had been exhausted. Four years earlier, she had suffered a cardiac arrest, and medication failed to improve her condition. In a book chronicling her journey, she describes the insufficiency of the gratitude she felt in the wake of her new lease on life:
Yet I have found that it is not enough for me to be thankful. I have a desire to do something in return. To do thanks. To give thanks. Give things. Give thoughts. Give love. So gratitude becomes the gift, creating a cycle of giving and receiving, the endless waterfall. Filling up and spilling over. To give from the fullness of my being. This comes not from a feeling of obligation, like a child's obligatory thank-you notes to grandmas and aunts and uncles after receiving presents. Rather, it is a spontaneous charitableness, perhaps not even to the giver but to someone else, to whoever crosses one's path. It is the simple passing on of the gift.
(Bartlett, 1997, p. 124)Gratitude in response to received goodness. It is a natural emotional reaction and quite likely a universal tendency to respond positively to another's benevolence. The word gratitude is derived from the Latin gratia, meaning favor, and gratus, meaning pleasing.
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