How Can We Be More Appreciative?
We tend to think of ourselves as sophisticates. We are one of those kids who are genetically destined to get the best internships, possibly in a fancy start-up with free lunches provided, and spend the rest of our lives in the biggest city we can afford. We would go to museums. We would go to operas. We would drink fine wine. We would live in an apartment where, when something goes wrong, we can call someone else up to fix (or complain). As ideal as it may sound, it seems lacking. It lacks the beauty of nature.
Is our everyday 21st century city life an inevitable side effect of industrialization or something more insidious?
Some of us take the leap of faith to go out of the city and be somewhere rural. It may be a few days, weeks or months. It may be in a farm or by the sea. When we spend time with nature, it inculcates a need for space, isolation and silence. It gives us room to grow strange and introspective. It makes us an idler. It makes us a dreamer. But as efficient do-ers thanks to the city life, we want to cram all the idle goofing off we didn’t get to do for the longest time.
But goofing off isn’t exactly the sort of thing we can cram.
We would stand out in the open at night under the stars, waiting and hoping for one to take us with them. We would take a closer look at the animals that we’ve seen a thousand times whilst scrolling through Facebook. We would start smelling the air differently, and wonder if seasons know how special they are. It would probably be the first time we chance upon many fireflies glimmering across the lawn.
If aliens could see this, they would think this must be the most beautiful planet in the galaxy.
But, do we think that we’re living on the most beautiful planet in the galaxy? In a way, our experience with nature is very much alike to dying. It is only when we notice the vastness of the world, from the stream of autumn colors to morning mists, that we are minded of our everyday busyness. We know intellectually that all the urgently pressing items on our mental lists — our careers, the daily headlines, the goddamned taxes — are just so much noise, that what truly matters is spending time with our loved ones and ourselves. But in the same way that we only truly start to change the way we live when we know we are going to die, in the same way that we only start to appreciate our girlfriends only after they have become our exes, we are perfectly designed to be imperfect this way. We know, but do we?
We can’t feel crazily grateful to be alive our entire life any more than we can stay passionately in love forever.
Most of us inevitably return to a certain emotional baseline after circumstantial highs and lows. We would like to think that scooting off to somewhere foreign would be a permanently life-altering experience, but in truth, it is less riveting than some of the breakups we have gone through. That being said, I don’t believe fishes that miraculously slip away from the sharp beaks of bald eagles by sheer luck would live their lives the same way as they did before. There may be no words in the fish language to describe such a near-death experience, and these fishes would probably be called a liar by their friends. But when these fishes were in face of death for that brief period of time, I am sure they must have felt like they were outside of the world.
They must have felt like they could see forever.
Then it all ends. The vacation ends. The tingling feeling of near-death experience ends. The melancholy is a common event. Part of it is the dread and hatred of back-to-school time, unchanged since childhood. In these moments (which are very similar to the ones when we wake up awfully early on Monday mornings), we start to question if we really need this job. We always come back to the same conclusion. Then, we tell ourselves that there is a next time. A next vacation. A next idling session. A next melancholy. A next time that we take things for granted — again.
