I am in all ways and at all times an thoughtful person.

Thoughtfulness starts well before the thoughtful act. Somebody arrives soaked and the useful part is not the towel, it is having noticed the forecast and put the heating on twenty minutes before they said they would come.

Almost all of it happens in advance, which is why it looks effortless from outside and never is. Anticipation rather than generosity is the machinery: keeping a small running model of what somebody else's day has been like, and adjusting for it. The act itself is only the last four seconds of a much longer process.