1) Appre­ci­at­ing life itself

Here and now is where each of us lives and has our being. In case you haven’t noticed, there is no alter­na­tive. You can stand there and hold your breath until you are blue, demand­ing a bet­ter deal, another real­ity. And noth­ing will change. Many do not want to accept this.

“It shouldn’t be like this!” they wail. Well, take a moment to think.

How ‘it’ is and how you are, right now, in this sec­ond,
is how ‘it’ is and how you are, fair­ness or ‘right­ness’ notwith­stand­ing. Indeed, how could it be any other way?

So, you ask, what has this to do with appreciation?

Well, I have no other life to live than the one I am liv­ing. I have two choices.

1. I can bitch, moan and com­plain, and be mis­er­able, or
2. I can express appre­ci­a­tion for every­thing that has brought me to now, (each of those past moments of now) and choose where I want to go from here.

Appre­ci­a­tion, it seems to me, is the bet­ter choice.

The word appre­ci­ate comes from the Latin appre­cia­tus, which means val­ued, appraised.

Appraisal is not judge­ment. Appraisal is all about (e)valuation—giv­ing value to. In all instances, assign­ing a value is intensely per­sonal. I choose how and what I value.

When it comes to life, I con­tinue to ask the obvi­ous: what hap­pens when, instead of valu­ing, I judge? Answer: I make myself mis­er­able, and yet am stuck in exactly the same life.

To appre­ci­ate is to add value to.

Land and build­ings, in a bull mar­ket, appre­ci­ate, or go up in value. It is the same with appre­ci­at­ing life, myself, and oth­ers. Find­ing value in life, self, and oth­ers actu­ally makes every­thing more valu­able, more worthwhile.

The things I appre­ci­ate, appre­ci­ate.
Inter­est­ing, eh?

Now, some will argue that being appre­cia­tive is the same as being in denial. “How can you appre­ci­ate life when there is so much suf­fer­ing in the world?” As if bemoan­ing life ever improved any­thing. And God for­bid you get too cocky… Good lit­tle Puri­tans, after all, always focus on denial, sup­pres­sion, and ‘pie in the sky, by and by.’

Appre­ci­a­tion changes your focus.

In order to move through life ele­gantly, one has to get into the habit of see­ing through the burn­ing desire to judge, awfulize, and think­ing that how things are now is how things will always be (universalizing.)

With a bit of wis­dom, you will begin to see that what has gone before is just stuff, and it has no real mean­ing (other than the mean­ing you put on it.)

Appre­ci­a­tion is all about see­ing the value in being alive and hav­ing expe­ri­ences. From this sim­ple shift in per­spec­tive comes a pro­found respect for the strug­gles of oth­ers, and a peace and con­tent­ment as you work your way through the highs and lows of your own life,

Here are a few things worth appreciating.

• being alive
• hav­ing a body
• hav­ing a mind
• hav­ing a spirit
• liv­ing where and when you live
• hav­ing free­dom of choice when it comes to interpretation
• cre­ativ­ity
• aes­thet­ics
• Neko Case (couldn’t resist)
• the whole catastrophe
• Bud­dha nature
• grace
• rela­tion­ships
• inti­macy, sen­su­al­ity, sexuality
• passion
• pur­pose
• the joy of learning
• med­i­ta­tion

And on and on, ad fini­tum. The dis­ci­pline of appre­ci­a­tion is a way to bring such things to mind.

I’ve men­tioned my mood­i­ness in past arti­cles, and while per­haps sappy, often my cho­sen way out is appre­ci­a­tion in gen­eral, and appre­ci­a­tion for Dar­bella in par­tic­u­lar. What’s odd about it is the path I took to get to her— from Buf­falo to Chicago and through two prior mar­riages, and finally, there she was. From this I learned sev­eral things:

• Every bit of the years of expe­ri­ence that came before my meet­ing her shaped and formed me into who I was that day, in a sense mak­ing me ready for her.
• Learn­ing what I have learned, and walk­ing with the peo­ple I have walked with, includ­ing all of the “dra­mas” I have expe­ri­ences (and then let go of) is the basis who I am today.
• I couldn’t write this with­out every expe­ri­ence I have had.
• I appre­ci­ate and share all of this with the peo­ple I care about.

2) appre­ci­at­ing those who have sur­rounded you

There is some­thing free­ing and cleans­ing about respect­ing and appre­ci­at­ing grand­par­ents, and par­ents, rel­a­tives, teach­ers, friends, those who love me, and those who dis­like me. Inter­est­ingly, this is done for me, not for them!

One com­mon denom­i­na­tor in life is we all had a mom and dad. Some of them sim­ply and plainly were in over their heads, and sucked at par­ent­ing. Oth­ers excelled. Again, it does not mat­ter.

What­ever hap­pened to you while grow­ing up is sim­ply what hap­pened to you. You are more than free to make it as tragic as you choose, (and in some cases, what hap­pened was crim­i­nal, and awful) but in the end,
here you are, and that’s what hap­pened, and noth­ing can change one iota of it.

You are who you are because of each expe­ri­ence, and more impor­tantly, your inter­pre­ta­tion of each expe­ri­ence. Judg­ing an expe­ri­ence to be ter­ri­ble, and blam­ing it for every­thing that con­tin­ues to hap­pen to you is sense­less, and use­less, as, again, noth­ing changes.

The key to liv­ing an enlight­ened life is sim­ple accep­tance.

This is not about mak­ing ‘bad’ things ‘good’. It’s about let­ting go of the neg­a­tiv­ity and blam­ing that comes from hold­ing on to the judge­ment. The best way to do this is to change my story (my focus and atten­tion) from ‘vic­tim’ to ‘appre­cia­tive.’ (Thank­ful to have come through and to be the per­son I am.)

West­ern soci­ety has drifted far down the path of blame and vic­tim­iza­tion, and I encour­age you to walk briskly in the other direc­tion.

One way of doing this is through end­less appreciation.

Until and unless you grasp this idea, and make it your own, your poten­tial is severely limited.

End­less appre­ci­a­tion is never about sanc­tion­ing the past or ignor­ing the things of life that need chang­ing. It is a present moment exer­cise in self-location. As I end­lessly rec­og­nize that where I am is where I am, and that who I am is who I am, I can free my heart, mind, and spirit to act out of grat­i­tude and com­pas­sion, in this moment.

If you feel the urge to ques­tion what I’ve writ­ten, (“Yeah, but what about this? What about that? Look at what hap­pened to me!”) then take some time to really get into it. Get mad at all of the slights, assaults, vic­tim­iza­tions, and dra­mas of your life. Flood your­self with them, make your­self as sad, and stuck, angry and piti­ful as you can.

Then ask your­self, “Why am I argu­ing and attempt­ing to cling to this as my self-definition? And even if the whole world agrees with me, how does improve my sit­u­a­tion or my view of my self, right now?”