From the Coffee Table Book: “I Can Choose My Future”
From the Grateful Peoples Coffee Table Book — real, handwritten gratitude from people all over the country.
These communal journals started in 2016 as a simple idea: leave a notebook on a café counter and let strangers write down what they’re grateful for. More than 100,000 messages later, the best of them live in the Grateful Peoples Coffee Table Book. This is one of the most quietly powerful, exactly as it landed on the page:
“I am grateful because I quit my job today. I was polite and the feeling was invigorating. I can choose my future and today I did!”
You can feel the adrenaline in it — the exclamation point that wasn’t planned. And one detail worth coming back to: “I was polite.” They didn’t burn it down on the way out. They closed one door gently and still felt the whole sky open up.
A lot of people are quietly waiting for permission — to leave the thing making them small, to start the thing they’re scared of, to admit what they actually want. Here’s a stranger reminding everyone that the permission was theirs the entire time. “I can choose my future and today I did.” That’s not a complaint about the old job. It’s a declaration of ownership.
It points to something true about gratitude itself: it isn’t passive. It’s a practice that hands people their power back. Train your attention on what’s good and what’s yours to decide, and the pressures around you stop running the show. There’s a whole library of work at Positive Psychology on how gratitude and a sense of agency feed each other — grateful people tend to feel more in the driver’s seat, and people in the driver’s seat tend to feel more grateful.
No one has to quit anything dramatic today. But it’s worth naming one thing — small or huge — that’s actually yours to choose. Then choose it, politely, and see how invigorating it feels.
This entry is one of hundreds in the Grateful Peoples Coffee Table Book — about 250 pages of real handwritten gratitude, available in the shop. Every copy sold helps fund gratitude journals for students in classrooms that asked.