30 Days of Awareness

Source: My Modern Met

I downloaded an app this week -- the Gratitude Journal -- with a goal of recording things I'm grateful for every day for 30 days.  Maybe it will turn into a habit, but at the very least, it's a good personal experiment.

I've known for awhile that the practice can reduce depression, improve health and strengthen relationships; I just haven't been very disciplined about doing anything with that knowledge.

As human beings, we are subject to hedonic adaption, which means that humans quickly return to a stable level of happiness despite major negative or positive life events.  The thrill of positive events -- whether it's a new job, the beginnings of a romantic relationship or getting a puppy -- all wear off.  Thankfully, the same goes for the stress and sadness from life's more unfortunate events.

Because of this tendency, humans don't stay satisfied or grateful for very long.  Therefore, it's important to develop habits to see the world from a new perspective.

I finished the book, How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton this weekend about life lessons we can learn from the (very eccentric) French writer, Marcel Proust.

I found this excerpt about societies' flippant attitude on the telephone quite applicable:

By 1900, there were 30,000 phones in France.  Proust rapidly acquired one [...] He might have appreciated his phone, but he noted how quickly everyone else began taking theirs for granted.  As early as 1907, he wrote that the machine was:

"a supernatural instrument before whose miracle we used to stand amazed,and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream."

Moreover, if the confiserie had a busy line or the connection to the tailor a hum, instead of admiring the technological advances that had frustrated our sophisticated desires, we tended to react with childish ingratitude.

"Since we are children who play with divine forces without shuddering before their mystery, we only find the telephone "convenient," or rather, as we are spoilt children, we find that "it isn't convenient," we fill Le Figaro with our complaints."

I complain about the weather being too hot, air travel taking to long or the internet being too slow on my phone -- but, in reality, it's a miracle that I'm able to work half-way across the world in Singapore, take flights to places like Bali on the weekend and carry a mini-computer in my pocket that can access all of the information in the world.

The world we live in and our every day experiences can be pretty mind-blowing -- it just requires us to be aware in order to appreciate it.