Hi Friend
It happened. Seven months and 16 days later, I flew again. It was a bit surreal and definitely enjoyable. As you’ve heard, there were certainly less people in the airport and on the plane. Flying was the same, except they aren’t serving coffee, which I hadn’t considered. More importantly, getting on a plane meant I was going to an in-person live event. That was a blast!
For my first time back, I was in a first-time experience. The gathering was for student and community leaders at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota. To accommodate social-distance-seating, the event was moved to their beautiful new gym/arena. It was also the first time my slide deck was shown on a Jumbotron which required another person to manually switch slides. 😳
Not really a first, but another aspect that was uncommon was the event was held in the evening. I spoke at 7:30pm. That afforded time during the day, I don’t normally have. I ran in the morning at the Jamestown Reservoir and then went back there in the afternoon to spend time writing. It is a peaceful, beautiful location. (I should have taken more pics).
I kept thinking how amazing it was that this community of 16,000 people has this spectacular natural resource. That’s one thing that makes traveling so fantastic is discovering all these unique elements within a city or town, that the locals entirely take for granted because it’s just a part of their every day life.
We disregard what we always have.
It’s such a common refrain, “we don’t know what we have until it’s gone”, usually in reference to a person or situation. Why is that? What within our humanity is hardwired to take for granted what’s currently in hand? We know it’s not because we are looking for something more. We’re also hardwired with loss aversion; we’d rather keep what we have, even if less, than risk gaining substantially more.
It’s a curious paradox. It’s why the practice of writing in a gratitude journal offers us the opportunity to appreciate what we have. To be clear, I don’t think we’re ungrateful. I think so much of our life and surroundings blend into a background of normalcy we simply don’t see it. Which is an interesting dilemma to be in something so frequently that it disappears from our view.
That’s why an outsider can recognize incredibly valuable aspects of our life that we don’t. Have you ever invited someone into your life under the premise of “Please tell me about the awesome things in my life.” 😁 Ummm, I suspect not.
What if we got a weekly report titled Your Life is Amazing. What if we got reports from multiple people? The pushback of course is that most people, even friends and close colleagues don’t know the details of our existence. But that’s just it. Not being caught up in the minutia gives them a freedom to observe possible big items we’ve stopped seeing.
Your Life is Amazing Report
Relationships
Resources
Experiences
Opportunities
Talents
Skills
Stuff
I wonder if our response would be “yeah, but…” or “wow, you’re right”. I suppose a little of both. Imagine if we got one every week? We could enlist four people to offer thoughts once a month. Certainly there would be redundancies, but also there would be observations coming from their worldview, that would not be on our radar.
That kind of arrangement would assault our blended blindness. You and I know we have blindspots. They are really hard to accept because we think we know ourselves best. What the YLAR exposes is not so much spots, but entire landscapes that have blurred out of the foreground. We’ve bokeh’ed what’s important.
The pandemic has shocked our system with the pace of life stuttering, shifting our routines and proximities. From health issues to job losses, fear permeates our future. Yet our lives still contain an extraordinary amount of amazingness in them. Having assistance seeing that would only acknowledge that we want to make sure we don’t miss what’s right in front of us.
Instigating Ideas
1. Share this idea with someone and do a test round of YLAR with each other.
2. Go out in your community and find someplace cool.
3. If not a gratitude journal, write down 25 things you’re grateful for this morning (like now).
4. Identify something that used to be a blind spot in your life that someone revealed to you.
When I mentioned I had gone out to the reservoir the response was “that place is great”. I got the impression however, that they personally hadn’t been out there in a long time. We can know something we have access to is really special, but not keep it a priority. We have a set amount of time which we’re navigating as best we can. My hope is that we keep in focus what really does matter. It’s a painful lesson to learn over and over, only when it no longer is available to us.
I dare you to take an inventory of everything valuable you have in your life and assess to what extent you see and appreciate it all. I would love to hear after taking on such a ginormous task what someone else notices that is not on your list, that they see as valuable in your life. Please Share.