Things I Ask My Mother is a periodic newsletter, featuring one conversation between me (Mattie Kahn) and my mother (the incandescent Nessa Rapoport) on a topic that consumes us.

We’re back. Back to recording our little conversations, transcribing them for the internet, talking about wisdom and New York weather and gratitude and shoes. I know it’s been a while. Without doing too much defensive justification (I’ve heard women must stop doing that!), we had some good reasons.

We went on hiatus so that I could finish a draft of a whole, entire book (out in 2023!) and plan a wedding, and so that Mom could throw herself into the search for both a dress to wear to said wedding and a cashmere wrap to wear on planes, which she has been looking for since 2004. (I’m proud to report she found it.)

I mean, we are both exhausted!

But we missed this! We’ve had hundreds of excellent conversations in which I asked for dozens of morsels of advice that I then refused to internalize, and we had nowhere to share them! So like I said, we’re back. We won’t commit ourselves to a formal newsletter cadence, but we do promise not to go disappearing like that again. We have too much we want to relay about the best brow products (Glossier Boy Brow—still top of the heap) and the most immersive, niche-interest books (The Husband Hunters: American Heiresses Who Married Into the British Aristocracy—for the title alone).

For this don’t-call-it-a-comeback installment, we’ve decided to talk about gratitude. It’s a weird season for it, because there is so much to be grateful for as human beings who are alive and well and preparing for the turn of the calendar—and also so much to dread and fear and refresh Twitter about.

Below, I refrained from discussing how grateful I am that Bravo’s Summer House just dropped a trailer for its new season, but trust that I am, as usual, forever in the debt of mindless TV.

Mattie: A few months ago, I tweeted something like, “If I could feel the happiness I feel on a beautiful morning in New York, I would be a perfect human being.” It’s like, I just take a big gulp of fresh, gorgeous air, and I feel amazing. At other times, I’m a resentful, stressed-out millennial, railing about all the unanswered emails I have to deal with. If we’re talking about gratitude, I want to start there, because it feels so inaccessible sometimes. Like, I have this surge of peace and pleasure, but then I’m back to checking the news and being anxious about deadlines.

mattie kahn @mattiekahn

If I could summon the unbridled, uncomplicated joy and gratitude I feel when I walk through Central Park in late April even when I'm sitting at my computer or annoyed about an email or don't know what to eat for dinner, I would be all powerful

Are There More Tulips Than Usual This Year?After a year of languishing, New York City is flourishing.nytimes.com

Nessa: Your snapshot of the-way-we-live-now reminds me of something that happened years ago. My parents were visiting New York, and we went to an exhibit at the Whitney. My father was a renowned research physician and a well-read person who truly respected Dad’s* career as a serious painter and sculptor. But as he stood in front of a large abstract painting, he declared that he didn’t understand it.

[*“Dad” refers here to Tobi Kahn, eminent painter and sculptor, all-around genius, husband to Nessa Rapoport, and father to the editor of this newsletter.]

I have learned enough from being with Dad that I now know that that kind of appreciation for art is a language. There are a few gifted people who just have an intuitive understanding. Most people need to learn it. You have to look at a lot, read some, listen to people talk about what it is about a piece of art that moves them. Otherwise, it’s hard.

That’s applicable here. Some people are gifted and can find that inner sense of gratitude no matter what else is going on. For the rest of us, it’s a practice. We all know that. We just don’t all do the work.

I think to myself, for example, that if I don’t give even five minutes a day to contemplation, why would I expect to have serenity? I used to say about you, “Mattie was born on a sunny day,” because I think of you as a resilient, positive person. And gratitude is fundamental to that outlook.

Mattie: I do feel I am a resilient person, but there’s a difference between being resilient and being able to be in touch with the profound nature of good fortune, don’t you think? I’m a bounce-back kind of girl. I can deal with setbacks. But I don’t feel like that makes me better at being able to tap into gratitude when I feel it. And I should be feeling it all the time! I should be incapacitated with gratitude. But I’m not.

Nessa: We live in complex times. You, however, did not have a morose childhood, as you have famously labeled mine. You had a good one!

Mattie: I did.

Nessa: You didn’t endure an unnatural tragedy. Nor did I. You’ve had great health and a lot of love. But you know what I feel about the decade of the twenties; it’s the hardest one. All the research shows that as we get older and therefore more frail, more aware of what’s coming, what’s inevitable, we also find it so much easier to feel blessed and to know the gifts around us.

Whereas in my twenties, lucky as I was, I walked around in a thick fog of anxiety.

Mattie: Do you know what I mean, though? Do you ever have those moments where you feel—for a second or a few minutes—a deep gratitude that doesn’t have to do with a nice thing that happened to you? Sometimes I experience these moments, and I’m like, “Wow, what did I do to deserve this?” I think, “This is a drug. This feeling is the best feeling I have ever had. I wish I could let myself feel that feeling all the time!” But I can’t.

Nessa: I know exactly what you’re talking about. Decades ago, I was at the bar mitzvah of my friend Michael’s son. In his speech, Michael quoted a saying of Thich Nhat Hanh. I have thought about that saying ever since. Here’s the gist, because I’ve never been able to find the precise version: “When we have a toothache, we cry out to the heavens, ‘Please, please, take away the pain.’ But we forget to be thankful for the non-toothache days.”

Every day without sorrow, we should be—to use your beautiful phrase—incapacitated with gratitude. There are customized techniques to help people get there. Mindfulness may not be a solution for people who are struggling to put food on the table or who have frightening health issues or are dealing with the illness or death of people in their lives, although I understand from my friends who have endured great suffering that those techniques are more important than ever. But for regular people dealing with the stresses of modern life, it is possible to access a state of gratitude.

I’ve been doing an enormous amount of reading about trauma and how it lives in our bodies. The counterpart is that these glorious moments live in our bodies, too. When we can invoke them, we become again the people who were brimming with gratitude.

As an example: I grew up in Toronto and first fell in love with New York when I was eight, on a trip that was a present from my grandmother. When I came back, at 16, all I wanted was to live here forever.

Once in a while, when I’m walking on 34th Street, I look up to the tops of the buildings and remember being that eight-year-old child. There used to be a lot of shoe stores on 34th Street, and on that first trip, my grandmother took me shopping. My mother, always a health virtuoso, would not buy her daughters knee socks, because she had read that their tightness around your calves cuts off your circulation. But when we got to midtown, my grandmother bought them for me. I was over the moon. I loved them so much I pulled them up over my knees and wore them that way on the subway, feeling the infinite cool of New York City.

Sometimes, I can get there again. I’ll be walking along West End Avenue and I’ll think: “You did it.” I dreamed of living here—and I do live here.

I have friends who are much more adept at mindfulness—a skill I never felt, in my restlessness, able to develop. Now we laugh together, because when a crisis hits or we’re struggling, of course the first thing we do is forsake the practice. The poses, the breathing, whatever was getting us through is the first to go.

Mattie: I mean what else is there to do? It’s the only logical response.

Nessa: “I just don’t feel like it this morning.”

Mattie: Wait, I want to go back to the Thich Nhat Hanh quote, because, as usual, this is a quote I heard so much when I was growing up, but I remember a totally different version. So now we have to compare not just the actual version and your version, but the actual version, your version, and my version of your version, which is: “When you have a toothache, you cry out, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ You’re miserable. You feel the pain. Then, when the toothache recedes, you get this rare window into the feeling of gratitude for not having a toothache. You have this moment of spiritual grandeur, and you can for once feel the positive feeling of not feeling bad. And that feeling lasts, like, 12 hours. That’s what I remember: “You get one non-toothache day.” You experience the wonder of feeling healed.

Nessa: Let the record show that your version bears little resemblance to mine, but I really like it.

Mattie: But you said it to me!

Nessa: Remember one of our most revered NPR segments, whose source we’ve never been able to find?

Mattie: The drawer?

Nessa: Yes.

Mattie: I associate this story with Dad, and I remember the metaphor being that when you retrieve a memory to retell it or just to recall it for yourself, you call it up from a vast mental filing cabinet. But each time you return it to its “drawer,” so to speak, you return it in a slightly adapted state for having called it up in the first place. You end up editing your own memories. I should add that I once tried to write about this phenomenon and searched NPR’s archives to find evidence that it exists, and I couldn’t find a trace of it.

But hold on, I want to go back to our competing accounts of Thich Nacht Hanh. I have such clear memories of your saying to me, “You’re having a non-toothache day,” meaning you’re having the rare kind of day when you actually appreciate the absence of pain in your life! Mom, have I been misunderstanding you for years?

Nessa: I’m glad we had this little chat. No, the emphasis on gratitude is correct, but what I believe I took away from this quotation is that when we’re in pain, we’ll do anything to stop it. We pray—whatever mode you use—that the pain be alleviated. But when the pain is gone, we forget to be grateful. It is so hard to retain!

One aspect of behavioral economics that fascinates me is that it’s hard to predict accurately our emotion about an imagined event. That’s why people are notoriously terrible at assessing future feelings—whether it’s the way they’ll experience something great or something awful.

When they picture a brutal blow, they believe they won’t be able to endure it. But most people can. And when it’s something astonishing, they think, “Oh, I’d never be unhappy again if that happened to me.” Which doesn’t turn out to be the case.

I want to add another dimension. People look at someone who has had many blessings and cannot estimate and understand what it feels like to be that person. They’re only projecting how they think they’d feel if they were that person. Sometimes the person does feel elated, but often good news is very complicated.

Mattie: Right! Right.

Nessa: Again, you’ve brought back a memory. When I was around 10, I began to read the newspaper avidly; there was no internet. I remember reading about a man who had been imprisoned in China and was then, after years, released. He talked about how the grass looked so green, and everything seemed so miraculous. And I remember at 10 being envious of that radiance. Shows you what an old, weary soul I was.

Mattie: Mom!

Nessa: Yes, I know. But I didn’t understand then that this human being, whoever he was, would probably also experience trauma flashbacks and fractured, terrorizing memories. After the initial exhilaration, it wasn’t going to be simple for him.

I think what we’re talking about is not our craving some kind of paradise. We want that astounding human capacity to travel, in the present, to moments in the past in which we felt pure joy. It is really possible. I’m not talking about nostalgia. I mean that your body can inhabit the way you felt then, but without the anxiety—just surging happiness or dreamy tranquility.

Life becomes very intricate after childhood, for everybody. But when I look at you—my beloved daughter—I still feel you were born on a sunny day. And that you can return to that girl.

Mattie: I think so. With effort.

Nessa: It’s not an effort when you start to understand the riches inside your own mind. There are places to which we can gain access that can help to offset some of the blows of fortune. Gratitude is a core emotion of middle-age. If you can live in a place of gratitude, you’ll inevitably be happier, because happiness and gratitude are so aligned.

I used to have a big debate with my mother who, like my father, was brought up in the Great Depression, cautious, thrifty, and abstemious. When I told her that all I wanted to do was to be happy, she would say, “Happiness is a byproduct.”

I did not and do not subscribe to that depressing thought, but I have come to feel that gratitude and happiness do go together. It takes work. But it’s worth it.

Mattie: Well, mother, this is a pleasure. I love you.

Nessa: Love you, darling.

Things I Ask My Mother

On Gratitude