Savour the delight

Go and get something you really like – a treat, a piece of music, a picture, a memory, and immerse yourself in the enjoyment of it.

For a few minutes, don’t think about anything else except the sensations you associate with that thing. Savour it fully, and appreciate the relationship you have with it – how it makes you feel. Really indulge yourself in it until it is gone, or you are ready to stop.

And then simply allow the feelings of your heart to express their gratitude for this moment. That you should be in the small minority of the thousands of generations, and myriad situations of the world’s population that had the space, the investment and the resources to create this moment for yourself at his point in time.

You are seriously blessed, but only if you choose to feel that way.

Savour the mundane

Take the green path, and then, take something that is more mediocre and common place for you, something you do daily,  … your lunch, a short walk, the view you have, and repeat the exercise.

Determine to pick up and appreciate every nuance. How it feels, how it looks, smells and tastes, its variety, its harmonies and contrasts. Its subtleties. Its easily overlooked finer points.

And determine to appreciate how blessed you are to be able to access these things, and feel the gratitude you have for being in a small proportion of the populous that is privileged to have this experience available to them.

Determine to do this every day you engage in this routine over the next 7 days, and then choose whether you want to make a habit of it.

Appreciate your advantages

Take a piece of paper, and pen and place them in front of you. Consider your life if you had been born in the 95% of decades in the world where your ‘class’ would not have the privileges open to you, or you were born today but to the 95% of the world that don’t have access to what you see as common place.

Then begin to make a list of all the things that you appreciate now that you wouldn’t otherwise have.

When you have written down 50 items, pause and re-read the list, and allow your heart to feel as it would if you had lived a life without them, but had suddenly been given them at this very moment. And allow yourself, just for a moment or two, to act out what you would do with that gift.

It sounds childish I know. But why? What is it about being an adult that causes us to deny ourselves the true experience of delight? The true appreciation of the amazing things around us? The heartfelt gratitude for what we have? Perhaps this, in part, is what is meant by the scripture: “… unless you change and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Two people can be in exactly the same situation and, by choice, experience totally different things. As Aldous Huxley said: “Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.”