Appreciation is a lost art. I don’t mean lost in the sense that it fell out the window or it was buried in some attic… I mean lost in that we (or I) just don;t know how to do it anymore. I’m not even sure that I knew how to do it to start. I want to be able to appreciate things in real time…while they’re in front of me. I don’t want to need perspective, a bit of time between what’s in front of me and the realization, in order to realize that I should’ve appreciated it. An especially good ice cream cone, a great catch, a funny moment that WASN’T caught on someone’s smartphone. Here again, technology has taken a bit of that art of appreciation away. Why should you appreciate something, I mean REALLY appreciate something if all one needs to do is tap twice on your charged up rectangle and it’s there… whenever and wherever you are.

It’s getting to the point that people can’t even tell a story anymore without having to pull out the phone and incorporate some visual aids. What is that? We’re losing something very important… more important than the art of appreciation… we’re losing ourselves, our ability to recount moments, to record moments with our heads and not what’s in our hands. Obviously, there are many benefits to this as well…many lives have been saved, many wrongs have been righted…

But, our history is recorded on a finite material. Once the power goes, so does history… so does appreciation.