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Has anyone ever told you to “count your blessings” or “stop and smell the roses?” These trite phrases tend to be used to dismiss your complaints and fears. We should stop using them as off-hand admonitions, though, because they’re actually very powerful, deeply helpful practices!
Welcome to the second episode in our Calming Fear series. Last week, I explained how curiosity goes a long way to banishing fear. Today, I want to talk about a practice that has been incredibly beneficial to me, personally. It’s called appreciative joy and it’s very easy to do. It amounts to stopping to smell the roses.
Life is full of joyful things, and you can find them easily. All you have to do is slow down and pay attention. In other words, just be mindful. 
Let me give you an example. Right this moment, as I’m recording this podcast, there are many small, joyful things I can notice. I can smell the wonderful aroma of the cup of coffee on the desk next to me. I’m a bit of a coffee addict and the smell actually causes me to relax. I can feel the warmth of my sweater in this cool room, very nice. And there’s a red-breasted nuthatch in the tree outside my window. It doesn’t chirp so much as it grunts. That makes me smile. It’s beautiful, too. As nutchatches feed, they face the ground and hop down the tree, backwards from the way other birds do it. I can also notice the wave pattern drawn by my recording software as I speak. It’s pleasant to watch it bobble along.
As Thich Nhat Hanh says, when you slow down and become mindful you will see that you all the conditions of happiness are right here.
Of course, the goal of a mindfulness practitioner is to be mindful all of the time, but that’s not easy to do. It’s why we refer to mindfulness as a practice. We acknowledge that there is no such thing as mindfulness. There is only mindfulness practice. In other words, mindfulness only happens when we intentionally make it happen.
I’m a nature lover and I enjoy paying quiet, deliberate attention to the natural word. For me, it’s one of the easiest ways to practice, because it naturally makes me feel good so there’s incentive. When my husband and I first bought our home, there was a fountain in the backyard. I’m not talking about a little piece of statuary. There was a cement pond, 12 feet in diameter with the kind of water and light kit you see in the fountains at public buildings or shopping malls. It shot water 16 feet into the air, and had several different spray and lighting patterns. Of course, most of the time, we kept the fountain off and that’s when the birds moved in. And that’s when I became a bird watcher. I’d never before seen so many varieties of bird in one place and as I watched, I became fascinated by bird behaviour and I began to learn the nuances of their calls, too. The pond is gone now, but the birdwatching goes on.
And, that’s not all I attend to. I pay deep attention to the trees, noticing the development of buds in the fall, following the changes in the buds until they suddenly erupt into leaves, watching the leave change, not just in the fall, but over the course of the entire summer. There are lots of subtle changes to notice if you only pay attention.
A few years ago, I deliberately began noting sunrise and sunset. I’d noticed that our long Edmonton winters were starting to wear on me. The deep cold and snow doesn’t bother me much, but the long, dark nights do. So, I began a practice of noticing every day when the sun rose and set. That means I immediately notice when the days start to get a little longer and I celebrate, not with a party,