While I have yet to see the movie Garden State, I know the basic premise that Zac Braff is trying to explore is the concept of finding beauty in the breakdown. Odd, because this is something that I’ve always been facinated with.

In my 24 years I have yet to fully grasp why it is that we never appreciate what we have until it’s gone. Only in chaos or a state or loss do we truly value what once was previously held by us without acknowledgement. It’s almost as if the human psyche is unable to wrap itself around the “goodness” of a thing until we’ve seen the other side. Like plucking a toy off the shelf, looking for the pricetag on the back, we can’t fully judge the worth of something until we’ve seen all angles.

The catch of all of this is that due to our humanity, and finite position in time, it’s virtually impossible to see all “angles” of a situation at once. So we never get a true, unaltered, unobstructed view at things in our lives. We just get MTV-style, 5-second flashy glimpses. We’re happy when we get a puppy to play with, but that happiness fades in the passing days until the dog is hurt or missing.

Is it that we can’t hold onto a shiny object for too long without becoming distracted by the next shiny object to pass by? Is it that we’ve been trained to only value something based on what immediate gratification is being derived from it? Is this a generational symptom, plaguing only those in the recent media-saturated culture that preaches the gospel of Skin Deep Beauty and Materialism? Or were our ancestors just as burdened by our inability to consistantly and regularly appreciate everything we have?

Recently I’ve been catching glimpses of my appreciation for things. Like a passing silouette in a window or outside headlights bending around a dark bedroom wall, it’s a fleeting and temporal calming. “Everything’s good…” passes through my head.

And then it’s gone.

It makes me wonder if this is just me, that I’m the only one who has issue with appreciating things fully. Perhaps I’m just dead emotionally, in this respect, and these intermittant sprinklings of happiness or gratitude for all the blessings in my life are reminders that somewhere deep inside, the ability to recognize such is still alive.

All in all, i feel less human, poor in soul because I embody the phrase of “not knowing what you’ve got till it’s gone.” And I don’t want to. I want to learn to be different, whatever that means.

Whatever that means.