Learning Appreciation – Sunday, November 20, 1983
“A man stood before one of J.M.W. Turner’s unrivaled paintings and said, “I can see nothing in it.” Then the great artist replied, “Don’t you wish you could?”1
It is now a season of Thanksgiving, a time—in theory—when we should swell with appreciation. But too many of us eat our turkey with tired taste buds and turn numb eyes to the world. We’re too weary to be thankful or we’ve let life’s miracles become ordinary to us. We have too little time or too many troubles, The reasons abound, but the result is the same: we travel through life as if we’ve never taken the trip, missing it all.
But the happiest people in the world are not those who have easy days, painless relationships or lives without loss. The happiest people are those, whatever their lot, who have learned the art of appreciation, They don’t expect of the earth what it can’t deliver: life without frustration. Instead, they revel in what it can give. Sometimes it takes an eye to see it.
Andrew Wyeth once said that the colors beneath a stalk of wheat drove him wild with joy. He said he’d give anything to capture them on canvas.
Writer Hart Crane found such excitement in the English language; he’d search for days for the perfect word for a poem he was writing. One man said he was waiting by Hart Crane in the same office when suddenly Crane let out a roar of jubilation, finding a certain word in a dictionary.
A mother, watching her infant in a baby swing, noticed the child’s eyes light up with sudden understanding, The baby thrust his hand forward toward a toy, widely missing the mark, but it was a moment of discovery—the first time he’d ever reached for something. Seeing the miracle of that ordinary step in human development, the mother soared all day.
The colors beneath a stalk of wheat, a word in a dictionary, a baby doing a very usual thing—most of us would not be filled at such moments, but we are the poorer for it.
We must learn to see and understand, stop and revel in life’s bounteous gifts to us. Feeling appreciation for what we have gives us strength to deal with what we don’t have and grants us happiness in the gray days.
Let us not stand before the world and say, “I see nothing in it,” for the only true reply is, “Don’t you wish you could?”
1 As Quoted In Leaves of Gold, Lytle, Clyde Francis, ed. The Cosslett Publishing Company p. 31
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November 20, 1983
Broadcast Number 2,831