Appreciation from '10 Ways to be Beautiful'

10 WAYS TO BE BEAUTIFUL
Appreciation
Simply the greatest; a total body and soul orgasm. There is no state more powerful than when the volcanic lava of appreciation is flowing through the veins; sunsets around the world glow deeper and richer with the generous and benevolent fall out of gratitude.
LET THIS BEATITUDE

BE MORE THAN A PLATITUDE:

ALWAYS LET YOUR ATTITUDE

BE ONE FULL OF GRATITUDE.
Feeling grateful is the purest of feelings. It has no hooks and no strings attached. It just makes you feel good. The state of feeling good is essential for all dream manufacture.

Just thinking back to moments when you have felt so grateful that communication was choked, will probably make your eyes smart even now.
I can recall one sharp February morning as I lay pressing broken crockery into cement for a wall mosaic, my neighbour across at the farmhouse bringing me hot soup. She had been watching from her window as gusts of sub-zero wind tore at her old rose-briars, and felt compassion for the shivering body pursuing its cheerfully pointless creative endeavours. Looking up to see steam rising from this magical bowl of soup and curling round the crusty roll makes me feel good 10 years later. It was bacon and lentil, and it still feeds me. That’s how powerful appreciation is!
You can’t fake it either. You can’t pretend to appreciate something and still feel the power. You can look long and hard at something achingly beautiful; you can tell everyone how grateful you are for its existence; you can compose arias of adulation and poems of praise….but if you don’t feel it, the orgasm won’t come.
The facts are not enough. You probably haven’t died of starvation, drowned in a tsunami, had your nether parts gouged out by vindictive terrorists or been entombed in the mineshafts of Moria. So rejoice! Count your many blessings! You have so much going for you!
But there’s no bullying it awake either. The fact that millions of people are worse off than you counts for zero. The command that you should be damn-well grateful, you miserable son-of-a-bitch, after all we’ve done for you, is utterly meaningless. Appreciation comes without conditions from a deep well of power, and when your bucket is in that well, you are mighty.
We skim a lot of our life away, touching the surface of things. We slightly prefer this colour, we would rather have this fruit, we normally choose this make. We slide amiably along between narrow bandwidths of emotion, hardly ever stirring the water of life beyond an occasional ripple.

Then it happens. Something occurs that breaks our motion, startles us into observation and we suddenly look into life rather than at it. And whether it be a bowl of soup, a few thousand dew-jewelled spider-webs, frosted autumn leaves or the uncanny choreography of starlings gathering to roost, a little time-warp into appreciation opens up. And briefly you have the power of the universe beating in your heart.
It’s like that moment when you just can’t stop singing, when you feel like skipping rather than walking, when you need an 80-piece orchestra at your commanding fingertips to express the exhilaration of being alive, when you know you are in love. Why couldn’t the world always be this way? Well it always can be, though it’s true it probably won’t be! We just aren’t that skilful.
You can’t fake or bully appreciation as I have already said, but you can do a lot to make the ground very fertile and receptive to its springing up. Almost every view carries in it plenty of things to marvel at or whinge about. Right now, without straining my neck unduly, I have the choice of a window that needs cleaning or some cloud-wisped mountains bronzing in shafts of late-autumn sunlight; a wall that pleads for repair or the crystallized firework of a creeper that leaks and bleeds outrageous colours all over the concrete; a squashed slug or an inflated and switched-on lizard.
Focussing on the broken wall, the dirty window and the dead slug makes appreciation a good deal less likely for me than filling the cinema screen of my mind with pictures of secret mountains, gorgeous creepers, and lively lizards. Dead slugs may do it for you and good luck!
Deliberately and repeatedly lifting out the picture that you like the most, makes the welling-up of appreciation so much more likely. It doesn’t mean pretending everything’s lovely when it isn’t, or denying that the squashed slug exists. It means admitting that you direct your own film and bothering to select the images you prefer to screen.
There are many truths available so why not choose the one that allows for the greatest number of good feelings to occur. You are as likely to get daffodils dancing in the central lane of the M25, as you are feelings of gratitude when your chosen focus is on the things that drag you down.
Every morning, a blank canvas and a fresh palette. Rosy and bright or pallid and blood-shot?
From '10 Ways to be Beautiful' by Dauda Zai and Jenni Prndownload some free chapters here..

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