What’s really happening when we “take something for granted”? We stop noticing a person, a thing, an event or a situation. We stop being in the moment and experiencing all that it has to offer. Usually, we experience less of the intense emotion that it first elicited. In some ways, that’s a good thing. We wouldn’t want to experience the extreme high spike of emotion we feel on our wedding day, or birth of a child every day. What went up sooner or later, will come down. It’s lovely to have peaceful non-peak moments with our loved ones.
Continued exposure to something is the most common reason we first start doing what we call taking it for granted. When you are crossing the street in a foreign city, you are likely to be acutely present and aware of everything that is going on. You are not likely to be daydreaming or distracted thinking about what you have to do late in the day. Back home, you can be balancing grocery bags, or walking the dog as you cross the street without paying much attention and you’re probably just fine. If we translate that over to relationships, it is easy to see what often happens. The people that we spend all of our time with are often the ones who get less of our undivided attention. We basically know their routines and can predict what they think and feel about most things so we think that we don’t have to be fully attentive. But, of course that is not true and the costs are huge.
The attention we give to others is not only important because we learn new things but also because we are giving our attention to them. Our attention, care, concern, and interest in the other is valuable to ourselves as well to the other. We risk losing this special bond and valuable and precious moments when we take it for granted that we already know what they are going to say.
It’s useful to think of taking things for granted as not being present in the moment. Our presence and attention is good for us and those around us.
To being present!
