So, I've adopted the practice of Anticipation! Participation! and Elaboration! as a part of my program for maintaining mental health and simply enjoying life. Look here! to get a sense of what I'm getting at. I thought I'd stumbled upon a simple, fun practice that could stretch out memorable events, but I suspect that it is possibly much more powerful than that.
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| Jackie Chiles; from the web! |
Note that Anticipation! Participation! and Elaboration! (or for my purposes today, APE!) represents the future, present and past. Simply enough, we anticipate future events, act in the present, and can elaborate on past events.
Meanwhile, this Buddhist has reminded us that control of our reaction to current conditions is the key to ongoing happiness. While this is an easy statement to acknowledge, we know the difficulty lies in doing so, productively.
Let's face it, the Past and Future are basically eternal, while the Present is a razor-thin, ephemeral instance. How can one hope to remain Present? It's such an unlikely nano-target. What are the odds of simply Being There?
I now can see that my practice of "Going APE!" is really about maintaining these events in that most fragile of times, the Present. Whether I am Anticipating! or Elaborating!, I am in the current act of actively appreciating and/or understanding my experience. (Anybody who has fished or played ball with me will attest that I Participate! to my fullest ability.)This really is an exercise in Being Present and maintaining that presence.
There's a huge difference between these exercises of active appreciation (and here, I am suddenly reminded of Appreciative Inquiry) and other approaches that distance ourselves from an experience. Here, I'm thinking of "fearing" or "hoping" for a future outcome, or "longing for" or "missing" a past event. These create some sort of artificial barrier between our current selves and mindset and the event(s) in question. These do not allow us to fully immerse ourselves in the event; the very nature of these feelings is one of disconnection. My exercises foster connection. I think they do so even in the face of time; there's a certain time-independence in actively planning or dissecting an event towards a positive end.
It's pretty well documented that simply Being Present is a key to a sense of happiness, effective relationships and overall wellness. Little did I know that my fondness for fishing stories and experiences would provide a meaningful framework for me to realize (actualize?) something so fundamentally important.
So, here's today's advice: to be more human, feel free to Go APE!
