Gift of appreciating

In today’s aggressively competitive world, with many of us having adopted this ‘first in all and second to none’ mode of existence, each one of us is busy preoccupied with our own life, obsessed with our own happiness and successes of all kinds. When this has been our attitude, apparently appreciating good qualities in people around is something that doesn’t come spontaneously and naturally to us.

Even when we bump into friends/relatives at social gatherings, we try buttonholing them to amplify at length about our own supposedly amazing achievements and accomplishments that we seldom lend an ear to listen to someone else’s tales of triumphs or talents in life.

Even if they venture talking about any of their success stories, we suddenly interject them, and subtly switch over to some other topic, so as to sidetrack them and shackle their speech in saying something good about themselves.

Many of us, especially the ones with inflated egos, refrain from appreciating, because we feel the ‘appreciating act’ would be a blemish on our ego, besides being infra dig to our image. At times, it is pangs of inferiority complex, or incompetence, or some kind of intellectual insecurity too that prevents people from appreciating others. If not that, then it’s that overweening attitude wherein we overrate ourselves and our own qualities that restricts us in taking cognizance of others’ qualities and appreciating them.                

Of course, there are also folks who indulge in sycophancy by extravagantly appreciating others using hyperbolical phrases. So, this sort of going overboard in ostensibly appreciating people in order to wheedle them into favouring us is more of shallow blandishment than genuine appreciation.

On the contrary, when we sincerely appreciate some good quality in a person, it not only makes the person instantly happy, it makes us ineffably happy, too.

Interestingly, how much ever animus we may have against someone, when we try appreciating him/her for something, we find all our hard feelings magically evaporating within a trice. No wonder it’s believed that the genuine appreciation has such amazing power that it can transform even the most churlish and cantankerous persons into amicable and amiable beings!