It’s easy to appreciate a favor, or a good opportunity that comes along. But those things don’t come along every day. Or do they?
It’s not always easy to recognize the value of the things we see every day, the ones hidden in plain sight. Two good examples of things that we can appreciate this month: snowflakes and people.
At first glance, they’re all alike, but then upon closer inspection, each one is different. Sometimes they make you happy; sometimes they’re a pain. Like people, snowflakes come in all different sizes. Snowflakes can reach two inches across under the right conditions. According to the Guiness Book of World Records, the biggest snow flake ever recorded was a whopping 15” across, back in 1887. Like people, they all have six sides, and no matter how different they are in appearance, they’re all the same on the one that counts — the inside.
They all have a different way of affecting our life. Some people stay in our lives for just awhile, like a winter squall; some push through like a blizzard leaving quite a scene behind them. And some stick around forever, and becoming a part of your life with the depth and steadiness of a rock — like a glacier.
The key is to try to appreciate them not just at the times when they’re beautiful and sparkle, but even when they’re so cold it burns. Because the thing is, even if we don’t see eye to eye, a whole bunch of people with different ideas, backgrounds and viewpoints can be so much more powerful than any one of us. When we need friends to lean on. When our communities need volunteers. When our world needs new inventions, innovations and inoculations.
German inventor Friedrich Koenig said that “we tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.” We can appreciate how beautifully the snow lays in the layers of the branches on a row of pine trees in the morning light, and then appreciate something in everyone we meet throughout the day. They say money can’t buy happiness. Maybe appreciation is the currency we’re looking for.
