Well, there’s one thing you can always say, no matter what the situation is, and that’s that when you lose something, when something is taken away, you are then better able to appreciate its value.
So you could almost call this good news or a positive story, but it almost seems too cheap to do that, because you really can make this about any situation, no matter how terrible.
You could say, “Well, you know, you’ve lost all your money.
Well, isn’t that, you know, doesn’t that really help you to appreciate the value of money? There’s a positive takeaway for you.” Or even worse, you lose your health, and that helps you to appreciate the value of health.
Of course, this is only really something that we can take comfort in if it’s something that we feel is temporary, something that we can get it back.
So if we temporarily lose health, we can then increase our appreciation for health, and then, hopefully, we get it back, our health comes back, and then maybe we can have greater appreciation for it, take better care of it the next time.
And same thing for money or love or whatever it is.
So if the thing isn’t coming back, well, then, it’s just kind of cruel to point that out, that “Oh, you know, now you can appreciate the value.
Now that you have lost what you will never have again, now you can appreciate its value.” Well, maybe true, but doesn’t quite qualify as a feel-good story.
But in this case, it seems like this is something that we can take out of the situation, that all the things that we are now being prevented from doing, all the inconveniences, the restrictions, they can now call to mind all the things that we enjoyed doing before that we took to be absolutely normal.
For the rest of our lives, after this lockdown ends, we can maybe have a little bit more appreciation for even the most simple things about freely moving around in public, openly interacting, and doing all those normal things, that we assumed were normal, which now we are unable to do.
So as long as we remember the time of lack, the time where these things were missing, then we can always have that extra layer of appreciation for these things once we have them again.
And this seems to be something that applies in general in life, and it’s something that we can apply to any aspect of our life.
As soon as something becomes expected and normal, and we just sort of expect it to continue automatically, then we lose appreciation for it.
But if we really can really call to mind the temporariness, the uncertainty, the ability for anything that we have to be taken away, if we appreciate that impermanence of anything at any time, we can then apply this same principle to anything in our lives, even life itself.
Our lives could disappear at any moment.
In each of our cases, we never know when they could end, and I guess in the case of life, since once it’s over you can’t really lament its loss, but just even thinking about the idea that, you know, maybe I could have died but I didn’t, or, you know, I might die at any moment, but I’m not dead right now, even that kind of thinking can lead to a new level of appreciation for having the thing.
So it almost seems like there’s some potential here to deliberately remind ourselves of the things that we have that we assume are normal.
Just like we assumed being able to do all these normal social things around town.
We assumed that was normal life, until it’s been taken away temporarily.
And the same thing applies to any of the other aspects of our life.
Everything that we appreciate in life could be taken away.
And although maybe thinking too much about that can lead to just worrying too much about oh, you know, I might lose it, but if we simply accept that everything that we have is temporary and uncertain, then it seems like that can help us to better enjoy these moments that we have these things and that we’re here.
#appreciation #whatsmissing #missing