Thank you

Life forces us to jot down a few words of gratitude on a regular basis: for holidays, meals, gifts, or the people who have a special place in our hearts. Too frequently, though, our communications fall flat or seem unconvincing: we say the meal was amazing, the present was brilliant, and the holiday was the best ever, all of which may be true, but we miss the mark on what truly touched or moved us.

To improve the effectiveness of our messaging, we could learn from something unexpected: quarter the history of art. Many paintings and poetry are essentially thank-you messages to various corners of the globe. They're thank you notes for a spring sunset, a river valley at dawn, the last days of autumn, or a beloved's face. The level of detail with which the world has been researched is what distinguishes great art from poor art.

A gifted artist is, first and foremost, someone who can take us into the details of why an event or a location was meaningful to us. They don't just tell us that spring is lovely; they pinpoint the specific contributing aspects, such as the softness of a newborn's palms, the contrast between a warm sun and a brisk breeze, and the pleading cry of infant blackbirds. The scenario comes to life in our minds when the poet advances from generalities to specifics.

In art, the same is true. A brilliant painter selects and emphasises the actually attractive characteristics of a given landscape beneath a broad sensation of pleasure: They highlight the rocky top slopes of a mountain or the how a sequence of hills and valleys opens up in the distance by showing sunlight streaming through the leaves of trees and reflecting off a pool of water in the path. They've questioned themselves, with remarkable thoroughness, what it is about a scene that they find particularly appealing, and faithfully reproduced their key impressions.

The fact that our minds are not well set up to understand why we feel the way we do is one of the reasons why great artists are rare. Long before we understand the foundation upon which our moods lie, we register our feelings in broad strokes and arrive at an overall sense of our moods. We're lousy at tracing our feelings back to their source, so having to ask too directly what was so appealing about a gift or why a person appeared so nice to eat dinner with is aggravating. However, we can be certain that if our brains have been influenced, the causes for this will be lodged somewhere in consciousness as well, waiting to be unearthed with deafness and patience.

We came to discover that it wasn't so much that the cuisine was good as it was that the potatoes, in particular, had a unique rosemary and garlic flavour. When a friend asked us how it had been for us in adolescence after our father died, they didn't just inquire in a polite way; they asked in a profoundly sensitive and compassionate way. The camera isn't only a terrific gift; it has a reassuringly clunky shutter sound that recalls a sturdier, better earlier world. The information will be there, ready for us to filter it via our mental sieve. The more specific the compliment, the better.

In love, we know that the more a partner can express what they like about us, the more genuine their affection can feel. The praise starts to count when they've studied the form of our fingers, when they've identified and appreciated the peculiarities of our personality, when they've noticed the words we prefer or the manner we close a phone call. Someone who hosts a dinner party or sends us a gift is no different; they, too, crave praise in specific rather than general ways.

To write good thank you letters, we don't need to be great artists; all we need to do is find and hold onto two or three very detailed reasons for our thankfulness.