Huston Smith in The World's Great Religions: "English people don't spend a lot of time enjoying life. They are too busy." Taking time to appreciate life is a good habit. Like meditation, a few minutes deliberately set aside to appreciate our gifts tends to make us mindful of the wealth and luck we have. Our sight, our appetites, our television and DVD's, our books and magazines, our friends, our food, our physical balance in sitting, standing and walking, etc., etc., etc. It can be a long list.
How can we intensify the minutes of appreciation and pack deeper appreciation and more of it into the same number of minutes? This is not necessarily a ridiculous or anti-laidback question. Researchers and thinkers should be free to ask questions that seem promising and still be open to and able to kick back.
Can we build machines to do our appreciation for us? Guy Kawasaki, business and Macintosh computer guy, said that experience has taught that building automated tools is more helpful and acceptable to humans and their needs than is building machines that do the work automatically. Still, in the matter of such things as appreciation and our own understanding, it might be helpful to think about the question of the possibility of reading machines, understanding machines, questioning machines and appreciation machines. What might they be like? How might they enhance our experience, our needs, our desires?
