Appreciating

What we appreciate says much about who we are, what we value, how much we care and our degree of awareness. Acknowledging and appreciating are indicators of what specifically you value in beauty, skill, excellence, valor, courage and many other virtues and qualities demonstrated by others.

The act of appreciating is a form of gratitude, one of the great elixirs of living.

The limiters of appreciating anything revolve around the degrees to which we have developed our ability to attend to what attracts us. Have you noticed that there seems to be a significantly different outcome when one has focused attention rather than the rambling of the mind? And you may also have noticed that the act of “thinking” via the mind, for most people, is a random affair where a firehose of noise and images, most of which have no bearing on the current intended thought, shoots by uninvited to distract and confuse the moment. I use the term “attending” rather than “thinking” simply because it includes more focus and intention, When you attend, you are “turning up the light.”

Another important aspect of any focused attention is the level of awareness and the degree to which one is either conscious or unconscious. Using an Iceberg as a metaphor, consciousness is the part we see above the waterline, all ten percent. Our unconsciousness is under the water line. Much more is going on in our brains unconsiously than we are aware of.

And, until recently, many neuroscientists thought that the brain was “fixed” at birth and that it was not possible to increase IQ or regenerate any neural pathways.  Thank goodness our knowledge evolved.  With this new understanding of neural growth we now recognize that the line that distinguishes the unconscious from the conscious mind can be as variable as the individual desires. The more we turn up the light of awareness, the more consciously aware we become of what is happening in our world.

This new outlook on brain development basically gives us permission, if we desire, to increase our sensory awareness and our conscious awareness as well as our appreciation. For instance, most people are aware of their five physical senses and use them in a very basic way, for survival. However, if you were to lose the use of your eyes, you would probably go through a grieving period, but after this passed you might begin to ramp up your senses of hearing and smell, becoming more conscious of counting paces, background noises and voice intonations. I will never forget the scene in the movie “Scent of a Woman” when the blind Colonel described to the young woman the specific name of bath soap and aromatic essence she was wearing so subtly. His sense of smell was ramped up, as was his appreciation for specific aromas. Something else seemed ramped up as well.