How to Appreciate Your Life—JUST AS IT IS
WE ALL HAVE MOMENTS OF appreciating what we see or taste or smell—just as it is. We relax and out of nowhere we accept our experience without wanting anything to be more or less or different. We feel that everything, at least for the moment, is complete.
When our mind is open and fresh, we see beauty everywhere, including within ourselves. There’s a sense of savoring the uniqueness of each moment. Things have never been just the way they are now. Nor will they ever be just this way again. We’re in tune with the transience of the world, with its poignancy and its profound richness.
The idea of appreciating things just as they are is simple and accessible, but it’s also very profound. It’s the key to feeling warm and loving toward others and toward ourselves. This ability to open, to experience things freshly, is always present in our mind. We may not sense it at all times, but it is waiting in the background. The question then is how to uncover this ability, how to contact it, how to nurture it. How can we learn to spend more and more of our time in this state of mind? How can we develop trust in the completeness of “just as it is”?
The first step is to realize the importance of how we choose to orient our minds. We may find that we’re habitually focused on incompleteness. We have thoughts such as “I am unworthy, I am lacking, the world is nothing but problems.” With this outlook,
