The value of appreciation

The first time I heard about the Cloud Appreciation Society was many years ago, when a friend of mine proudly announced that he had joined.  On a first impulse I found the idea incredibly whimsical, but I interpreted it as many other satirical or counter-cultural groups who manifested interests in far-fetched and odd subjects. There are many reasons why appreciating clouds is pointless in a conventional sense: they are almost as ephemeral as flames, with the difference that their occurrence cannot be caused (they just happen whenever they happen) and even our ability to predict it is fairly coarse and unreliable. Besides, the intrinsically local nature of clouds means that the only way to have a shared experience  relied on photography, which somehow tarnishes the ethereal nature of its objects.

Luckily the idea was not summarily dismissed out of my mind and it popped back to the conscious some time later. I honestly consider that this resurgence was very fortunate, because it led me down the path of what will eventually get to be known as mindfulness. It is not lie I was a pioneer of any kind, because this was 2006 and the mindfulness movement had been around at least since the 1980s, but philosophical revelations neat to follow their own path and mine started there.

Photo: Kru Tony Moore

The bottom of the matter is that one can only catch the ephemeral events of life i one is in the right disposition: last summer we enjoyed a wonderful view of the Perseids (and a big number of artificial satellites) when we were, by chance, sitting one evening on the terrace sharing a bottle of whine. We probably counted more than 60 meteors in one hour, which is unusually high, but we would have totally missed the show if we had not been sitting on the terrace or if we just had not switched off the lights. The Cloud Appreciation Society pointed out precisely that to me: that you have to be ready if you want to be able to catch the ephemeral.

The other lesson I extracted from the quirky concept of the CAS is that it is not necessary to witness grand events to be able to show appreciation. The aggregated effect of all clouds is undoubtedly important for Earth's climate, but it is hard to find anything more mundane than a single cloud. Still, pausing for moment to look up at the sky in search of a fleeting and beautiful cloud is an excellent occasion to count your blessings at the same time. I have mentioned before that I am not a spiritual person but I still reckon that luck has played a major role in making me what I am today. Even something of apparently as little transcendence as looking at the clouds is much harder if your stomach is growling empty or there is mortar fire two blocks down your street.

However, material security frequently brings its own set of problems: when you feel safe and well provided day in and day out it is only natural to start to consider these things a given. This is the case, for instance, of all the home-cooked meals that furnish our tables not by art of magic, but by the incessant effort of all those women who give up their careers to devote their time to caring for their families. (These days an increasing number of men are joining the rank of the home makers to allow their wives to pursue a profession, but it has been historically a female sacrifice and as such I mention it here). That is why devoting just a few seconds to indulge in the view of the dish, as if it were a cloud about to dissipate in the air, is the least we can do to thank them: show our appreciation.

Last summer I mentioned an investigation by Israeli psychologist Dan Ariely that showed that we are much less inclined to do a job (even a paid job) if we know beforehand that the result of our efforts is not going to be appreciated. Raising the pay might keep us at it a while longer, but the object we build or the words we write get immediately destroyed after completion, before anyone has had a chance to look at them, the alienation eventually becomes so strong that most people would simply stop working (even that means losing some money).

In the age of internet, however, appreciation is getting harder and harder to obtain. Where as in the past people had access to a limited offer of entertainment, some of which had a strong local character, the global nature of the World Wide Web has established a "tournament model" where one producer of content (or a small group) gets most of the attention while the big majority is condemned to languishing in the fringes, barely supported by their families, their friends and, with some luck, the friends of their friends.

Withing the limit of my time resources I try my best at diversifying my attention, venturing regularly into obscure alleys of off-the-path content just for the sake of exploration. As it is the case with the clouds, there are many wonderful graphic artists that inspire awe in me if I just find the time to look at their work. And still, I frequently feel like I am not doing justice to the effort that has gone into the painting.

Contrary to the written word, like the text you are reading right now, visual impressions are strongly parallel and hierarchical. Words come through our eyes one by one and in a pre-established order, so that every single one gets read (with the obvious exception of "diagonal reading", but that is a different story, I am taking about appreciating a piece, not scanning for information), but visually we receive a lot of stimuli at the same time (e.g. the whole picture) and our brain quickly classifies the content, sorting it in decreasing relevance so that we start by paying attention to the most important parts and, depending on the available attention resources, we can observe finer and finer details or leave much of the image essentially "unseen".

Trying to catch up with the undepletable flow of material coming out of Facebook, Instagram or  YouTube force me (all of as in fact) to decide how much time to devote to each individual item. It is easy to discard a video that is barely audible or a Facebook posting with strongly bigoted views, but what to do with a beautiful, lengthy text or the wonderful photographs and drawings that many artists publish on Instagram? Most of the time I give up on reading the text, regardless of how enticing it seems, if I do not have the time, but with the drawings it is much harder. Many of them take my breath away in the first second, but then I realize that I do not have the time to contemplate them in detail and my heart breaks at having to do an injustice to many of them by looking only cursorily.

No one will ever be in the position to give everyone the praise they deserve, but if we start by taking a bit of time to show our appreciation, many artists will probably feel more compelled to keep creating wonderful works of art. I, on the other hand, write out of compulsion and mental health, but would anyway welcome a couple of readers every now and then, so thank you very much if you have stayed with me this long. Have a nice evening.