We were walking our Labrador, Finlay, around the park one afternoon — it’s a dog park, but humans are allowed — when I saw a small glass jar catching the sun on a wooden bench.

My first thought was, someone’s trapping insects for a science project, followed by: I hope they remembered to punch some holes in the lid.

But as I moved closer, I could see that the jar was filled with tiny sheafs of paper, about the size a toddler might use to pen a letter to the Tooth Fairy.

I lifted the jar and peered inside, and at the bottom there was an equally Lilliputian pencil, about the size of my thumb. Pasted to the jar was a simple instruction. “Write 3 things you’re grateful for”.

I unscrewed the lid, pincered out a few pieces of paper, and began reading other people’s trilogies of gratitude. I assumed, since this was a public park, that they were meant for public consumption; in any case, they were anonymous, and I was curious.

“My father, Wisdom, The moon”, read the first one, with the Zen-like elegance of a haiku, although I wondered what the sun had done to deserve being outshone by a much dimmer heavenly body.

But to look at it in that light, I soon realised, is to miss the point. Gratitude is not a competition. It's the exact opposite: to be grateful is to surrender your ego, in an act of acceptance of the agency other people and things hold over your lives.

In the pencilled notes, I saw that people were thankful for their health, their friends and family, their jobs, their peace of mind, the companionship of their pets.

A child — I could tell by the handwriting — had sandwiched "my parents" in between "my cat" and "my goldfish". But once again, this wasn't an Olympic podium.

I was struck too by the absence of material reasons to be grateful. Nobody was thankful for their house, their cell phone, or their car, although someone had listed "the roof over my head", a heartbeat's pause for thought in a country where so many are homeless.

Then there was “sun” (at last, the sun!), followed by “health” and “wine”. I wondered whether wine qualifies as a material thing, but I was able to convince myself that it is elemental in nature, born of the fusion of human endeavour and the bounties of the earth. Cheers.

Each of the tiny notes was in its own way a tribute to the universal generosity of spirt that rises to the surface when we shift our attention from the things that vex us — loadshedding, potholes, politics, to mention just three — to the things that soothe and cheer us.

I put the notes back in their place, twisted the lid back on, put the jar back on the bench, and carried on walking Finlay in the park on a sunny day, all of which, on my own hastily-scrawled list, were reasons to be grateful.