We come to appreciate our own role and that of other people with regard to the contributions we make jointly in helping our world realize important images, purposes and values. An appreciative relationship is always leaning into the future. While we appreciate that which has been successful in the past, we don’t dwell with nostalgia on the past, but instead continually trace out the implications of acquired wisdom and past successes regarding our shared vision of the future.
Recognizing Distinctive Strengths and Competencies
Appreciation in a relationship also refers to recognition of the distinct strengths and potentials of those who are engaged in the relationship—including ourselves. An appreciative relationship is forged when an emphasis is placed on the realization of inherent potential and the uncovering of latent strengths rather than on the identification of weaknesses or deficits. People “do not need to be fixed. They need constant reaffirmation.”
Even in a context of competition, appreciation transforms envy into learning and personal achievement into a sense of overall purpose and value. The remarkable essayist, Roger Rosenblatt, reveals just such a process in candidly describing his sense of competition with other writers. He suggests that the sense of admiration for the work of other writers plays a critical role in his own life:
Part of the satisfaction in becoming an admirer of the competition is that it allows you to wonder how someone else did something well, so that you might imitate it—steal it, to be blunt. But the best part is that it shows you that there are things you will never learn to do, skills and tricks that are out of your range, an entire imagination that is out of your range. The news may be disappointing on a personal level, but in terms of the cosmos, it is strangely gratifying. One sits among the works of one’s contemporaries as in a planetarium, head all the way back, eyes gazing up at heavenly matter that is all the more beautiful for being unreachable. Am I growing up?
