Our world is filled with an abundance of beauty and wonder.

Surprised?

If you spend a lot of time watching CNN, reading the news, listening to talk radio or talking to people who spend a lot of time doing this kind of thing, your view of the world might be that most of the beauty and wonder of it is gone, and what is left dwindles away every day.

Or maybe it’s just that right now, you’re living in an area where you’d rather not be living, or working in an environment that you’d prefer to escape. Life feels kind of grey colored. Lifeless.

But the fact is, the world IS filled with an abundance of beauty and wonder. You knew this once. It may not have been that long ago that you knew this. Or it may have been way back when you were a child. We all saw the beauty and wonder at some point in our lives. This vision just got trained out of us, that’s all.

It’s time to retrain your senses.

Try This

While this retraining process is a great 30-day process, even if you do it for only a day, or just a few times in your day, it will waken something up within you.

And if you CAN commit to doing this process for 30 days, it’s likely that before those 30 days are up, you will find yourself doing it naturally, as a matter of course.

How to Retrain Your Senses

All you need to do is, every now and then, stop for a moment and look around you with the intention of finding five beautiful things, or five things that give you a sense of wonder.

If you have a timer on your watch or cellphone, you can set it to beep every hour.

Or you can do this every time you enter new physical surroundings during the course of your day.

It IS that simple.

Starting Small

But what if the idea of finding five beautiful or wonderful things around you every day, much less every hour or every few hours, seems like a daunting task?

Start small.

Take a look around you. Look for one thing that is beautiful. One thing that fills you with wonder.

You will find that just seeing and sensing that one thing will open you up for more. It will get easier and easier.

Use All Your Senses

While beauty often strikes us as being a visual thing, don’t limit yourself just to things that you can see. Use all of your senses. Feel the beauty that’s all around you, feel all the wonder.

The smoothness of the handle of the cup that holds your morning cup of coffee. The scent of that coffee.

Taste the deliciousness of things. Concentrate on the taste or the feel or the scent.

Engage all your senses.

As your awareness of the beauty and wonder all around you increases, you will also experience a deepening sense of appreciation.

The Concrete Jungle

“That’s easy for you to say,” you might be thinking right now. “But … I don’t live or work in the country. I’m cut off from nature everywhere. I sit in a cubicle all day. I breathe in stale processed air. And when I do get the chance to escape outside, it’s just escaping into a concrete jungle.”

Nature is, of course, abundantly beautiful, and filled to the brim with many, many wonderful things.

But there can be - and often is - incredible beauty in man-made things.

The Simple Paperclip

Take something as small and as common as a paperclip. Pick one up and look at it. Really look at it.

See the pleasing nature of its curves, the beauty of the pattern it creates. How neat and compact it is. How easy it is to hold.

Consider how simply and effortlessly it holds together several sheets of paper. How easily it can organize untidy, slightly chaotic piles of stuff. One small, little paperclip.

And how wonderful it is that someone actually came up the idea of a paperclip!

This is a game you can play with most things. Really look at something, and open your mind up to the wonder of it. You can do it with almost anything you come across.

Fill Your Day with the Beauty and the Wonder

There is beauty and wonder all around us. By taking a few moments every now and then to truly open your eyes and utilize all your senses, you will begin to see your environment in a totally different light.

When I first tried this, I found it didn’t take long before I could go into any room, or walk along any block in the city, and still have my eyes catch hold of beautiful or wonderful things.

And I found that I could always look up, at the sky. There is such beauty in the sky, in the clouds. On a sunny day. On a grey day. On a rainy day. On a snow-filled cold day. It never seems to matter. Looking up at the sky is my quick-fix. And you can see it anywhere outside. Deep in the city. Way out in the country. On an ocean. In the desert. It’s always there.

Nightly Reflections

Try this, too: every night before you go to bed, make a list of all the things you saw today that were beautiful, or gave you that sense of wonder. Don’t worry about remembering everything - five things an hour through the day adds up to a lot of things. Just begin making your list and let everything flow.

You may find yourself remembering things that you hadn’t even actively observed during your day.

The first time you do this, you will be amazed at how much beauty and wonder has always been around you. And every night after, you will reinforce what you’ve been discovering in your day, that the world IS a beautiful and wonderful place.

See for Yourself

Even if you only do this process sporadically, you will begin to change the way you see your world. You will begin to retrain your senses, use them the way you first used them when you were little and everything was magical and wonderful.

And if you commit to doing this process for a longer-period of time, you will effectively retrain your view of the world.

We do, indeed, live in an abundantly beautiful world, one that is filled with wonder.