"Thanks is for big things"

You might accept everything so far and still feel that the scale is wrong. You'd thank someone for a kidney. You'd thank them for taking a week off work to help you move. Laying a table? That's Tuesday. Nobody needs thanking for Tuesday.

Go back to chapter 3 for a moment. What's fine gets filed, and once filed it's not looked at. Wilson and Gilbert's model says we stop attending to what we've explained. A laid table is explained a thousand times over. It's been filed so long that it isn't a thing any more. It's the background against which the pan appears.

Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky tested a related idea with four hundred and eighty-one students over three months, in 2012. They asked what happens to the happiness from a good change in someone's life, and found the usual answer, which is that it fades. It fades by two routes. The good feelings from the change decline, and the person's expectations rise, so that what was a gain becomes the new floor. Then they looked at what slows the fading. Two things did. Continued appreciation of the change, and continued variety in how it was experienced. The students who kept noticing the good change kept more of what it gave them.

Those were students and a single positive change, and I'm reaching from that to a laid table on a Tuesday. It's my extension, and it's this. Everything fine in your life was once a change. The first time your partner laid the table without being asked, it was noticed. The first time your colleague handed in something that needed no rewriting, it was noticed. Then it happened again, and again, and became the floor, and now the only thing that shows above the floor is the pan. The fine hasn't gone anywhere. It's become invisible by repetition, and the way to keep it visible is to keep naming it.

That's why small and often is the whole point, and not a lesser version of the real thing. Big thanks for big things happens on its own. Nobody needs a book to thank the person who helped them move. What nobody does on their own is thank the person for Tuesday, and Tuesday is where they live. It's where you live too. If the fine in your life is only visible when it's new, then most of your life is invisible to you, and you're walking around in a house made of pans.