I don’t keep a gratitude journal — but I do keep a journal into which I occasionally pen thankful thoughts. And in the process of doing this I’ve noticed that there are at least two kinds of gratitude — forced and spontaneous.

Forced gratitude is what I summon when I’m walking to Metro on a cold, gray morning, wondering why I’m still slogging into an office, or on a leaden afternoon when the words aren’t flowing and it’s so late in the day that they never will. This is when I make the mental list: family, friends, health, income, productive work, words and music.

Spontaneous gratitude is what I feel when Copper is running at me with a Day-glo yellow ball in his mouth, all eagerness and joy. Or when I’m hanging out with the girls, individually or together, or even just talking with them on the phone. Spontaneous gratitude comes on walks or in quiet mornings like this one: clocks ticking (two of them), a cup of hot tea, an hour before I have to leave.

While it’s tempting to praise the latter gratitude over the former, in truth we need both kinds. One is our steady companion, the other a funny visitor, an outlier relative who once rode a motorcycle across the West. While you hope he’ll stop by often, you know he never will.