November 27, 2025
You ever have one of those moments where a quote doesn’t just speak to you, it tackles you like a defensive lineman who took your gratitude personally? That was me with today’s Thought of the Day: “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” Thanks, William Arthur Ward, for calling me out at 6:15 in the morning before I even finished my coffee.
The idea seems simple. If you feel grateful, you should probably let someone know. But most of us treat gratitude like it’s optional homework.
We think the nice thing.
We feel the warm fuzzy.
And then we… don’t say anything.
It’s not intentional. Life gets busy. A kid needs juice. Another kid needs a snack. The third kid needs the thing the first kid lost. Work emails start firing like popcorn. Someone at the JCC wants a graphic changed right now. Suddenly that moment of gratitude that felt so clear in your head gets shoved into the mental junk drawer next to the random Allen wrench from IKEA.
But here’s the part that hits me hard: gratitude doesn’t count until it leaves your mouth.
That sounds harsh, but stay with me.
If you feel grateful for someone, the way they showed up, the thing they did, the way they lighten your load without making a big deal out of it, and you keep it inside, they never get to feel what you felt. You’re holding the wrapped gift. And you’re walking around with it like, “Wow, this is nice,” while the person it belongs to never even knows it exists.
The older I get, the more I realize that gratitude is one of the few things in life that multiplies when you share it. I’ve had moments where I finally said the thing I’d been holding, “Thanks for doing that,” “I appreciate you,” “You make this easier than you know”, and the reaction is almost always the same. A pause. A breath. A small smile. Like the person finally got something they didn’t even know they were waiting for.
And you know what? It feels good for me, too. It completes the loop.
Feeling it is step one.
Saying it is step two.
Step two is the magic.
But expressing gratitude also means being willing to get a little vulnerable. It means admitting you needed help. It means acknowledging someone made your life better. And for some reason, many of us are more comfortable saying, “No worries, I got it,” than “Thank you, that meant something to me.”
Humans are weird.
Gratitude doesn’t need to be poetic. It doesn’t need to be a speech. It doesn’t need a perfectly timed moment with soft lighting and the soundtrack from a Hallmark movie playing in the background. It just has to be real.
Here’s what I’m trying to do: when I feel it, I say it. No saving it for later. No waiting for the “right moment.” No hoping the other person can read my mind, because let’s be honest, they can’t, if they could, half of my life would be much easier.
So today, try it. Let someone know they made your life a little lighter. Tell them what you noticed. Share the thing you were going to keep to yourself. Unwrap the present. Hand it over.
Because gratitude doesn’t count until you give it away.
🧠Read the full blog post where I explore this Thought of the Day and the Question of the Day
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đź’¬ Share Your Interpretation
How does this thought land with you today?
Who are you grateful for but haven’t told yet?
You can comment, or you can keep it quietly in your pocket — but I recommend saying the thing out loud.
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