Last month, we talked about something gratitude research keeps circling back to: noticing abundance doesn't just sit there quietly. It tends to move. People who practice gratitude regularly don't just feel good about what they have — they feel pulled to share it, almost as if noticing is only half the practice and giving is the other half.
I've been thinking about where I first learned that, long before I had language for it. It was apple trees.
An Abundance We Couldn't Possibly Keep
My family had several apple trees that produced far more than we could ever eat — a variety of them, different colors and tastes ripening at different times through fall. And because there was simply too much to keep, giving it away wasn't an afterthought. It was just what happened to the extra. My job, alongside helping pick, was to carry bags of apples to neighbors and down the street to the local nursing home. That part wasn't optional, and it wasn't treated as a favor we were doing anyone. It was just where the apples went.
We worked picking those trees as a family — not as a chore handed down to the kids while the adults supervised, but side by side, all of us up in branches or steadying ladders or filling baskets together. It wasn't something anyone dreaded. It was something we looked forward to each season, because being included made you feel like your part mattered.
We laughed a lot. We got scraped up and bruised together. I remember one particular afternoon my much-older brother lost his footing on a high branch and started to fall — he wasn't hurt, just startled, and so were we — and in the middle of his fall, one of my parents hollered up at him, "Keep picking!" Somehow that became one of those lines a family just keeps. For years afterward, "no matter what, keep picking" showed up as our private joke in every kind of situation that had nothing to do with apples at all.
The work didn't stop at the tree, either. We all carried the load through hauling, washing, prepping, standing around the colander stirring whatever Mom had going — applesauce, apple crisp, trays for the dehydrator. Everyone had a job. Nobody was just watching.
A Philosophy, Not Just a Harvest
Looking back, I don't think my parents ever sat us down and explained generosity or work ethic to us directly. They modeled it — in the orchard, and then everywhere else life asked for hands. The same side-by-side approach showed up tending the garden from planting through harvest, in yard work, and later, once we moved to the farm, in fencing and barn cleaning. Whatever the task, the pattern was the same: you worked together, you were included as someone whose contribution counted, and when there was abundance, you shared it without being told to.
This tracks with something gratitude and generosity research has found: the behavior that sticks longest isn't the behavior we're lectured about — it's the behavior we watch happen, over and over, by people we trust, until it stops feeling like a value and starts feeling like just how things are done. Nobody ever told me giving apples away was a kindness. It was simply what you did with more than you needed. That's a different kind of learning than being taught a lesson. It's absorbing a pattern until it becomes part of you.
What Got Modeled for You?
This is worth sitting with for a minute: somewhere in your own life, something got modeled for you the same way — not explained, just repeated, until it became automatic. Maybe it was generosity. Maybe it was showing up for people, or finding the humor in a hard moment, or simply the idea that everyone's contribution counts, even the smallest one.
If you want to go deeper with this, it's exactly the kind of noticing our Gratitude Guided Journal is built to help with — the prompts inside are designed to pull up memories like this one, not just ask you to list what you're thankful for. Sometimes the most honest gratitude work isn't naming what's in front of you right now. It's tracing a line back to where a pattern first took root.
We'd love to know: what's something that was modeled for you long before anyone called it a lesson? We have a feeling once you start looking, you'll find more than one.
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