# 35 Don't take things for granted

In the year 2018, I participated with my team in a hackathon competition called “Europe to the hearts”, It was about making people feel and understand how lucky they are for being part of Europe as a whole and all the advantages that bring. For the competition, we created a superhero called “Europe guy” whom we used to make different memes and funny videos where we showed how in Europe people can do and have things that other countries can’t, and how good this was. 

We won this competition even though most of us in the team were not even European. 

In these hard times of pandemic that the world is facing many people had noticed how they use to give so many things for granted, and that now they realize how important they were. 

That is the topic of today “Taking things for granted”.

I will explain the concept of taking things for granted in 3 parts:

1- It means not taking giving their proper importance, just because of the thought that they were always a certain way, and they will always be that way. 

2- It is not being present, being in the head all the time, and forgetting about everything around. Most of the people in the world are 90% of the time of their days in this state. A robotic state when they are not thinking of what they are living in the moment. Therefore when they pass in front of different things, situations happen or they get opportunities and experiences in front of them, they take them for granted and don’t appreciate them. 

3- Not being grateful for what you have and what happens to you every day. Not being grateful makes people lose the importance of things and take them for granted. 

Physically speaking, we can not be aware of our environment 100% of the time in the level of not taking anything for granted. If I think about it, being all the time in a state that makes us not take anything for granted would make us get in a philosophical trance in which thinking about our own existence as something we don’t think for granted would make us not even move. But that is going too far, sorry :D Let’s get back to the actual topic.

So to go deeper into the topic I will divide the explanation into 4 parts, the problem of taking things for granted too much, How things get better by not taking them for granted, Examples that we can see nowadays and how can we improve. 

Let’s start with the problem:

The problem of taking things for granted is that we stop noticing the importance that many of these things have, and by losing the importance we neglect them. Because of this, we can even end up losing them, and most of the time once we lose them is when we realize the importance they had. 

But trying to keep the balance in this article, I can say that the opposite can happen as well, we can take things for granted that not necessarily should be like they are or be where they are. 

For example, no relationship should be taken for granted. Doesn’t matter if it is a friendship or a love relationship. We always need to feed our relationships. We can not think that because we have a relationship it will always be that way. From both sides, the people have to keep it up. Like if they were flowers that needed water from time to time to keep being healthy, but of course, if we put too much water they could also drown.

But also the opposite, some people find themselves in toxic relationships with friends, love ones, or even family members. And they stick with them because they think it has to be that way. That they have to keep the relationship because they already have been in it from before. Maybe because it is a friendship that has many years, or because it is a partner that the person decided to have and they don’t want to admit they made a wrong decision even after many years or even because it is family and “Family is supposed to be there for you no matter what”. But that is just taking it all for granted and it should not be like that. Maybe getting out of that can also help change and have a better life.

 People that take too much stuff for granted, tend to turn into spoiled brats that don’t value the things they have or the people around them. People that are not satisfied with anything. Which reminds me precisely of the opening of the movie “The beauty and the beast”. 

It starts talking about a young prince that got a visit in his castle from an old lady asking him for food and shelter while giving him a rose as a gift. And the young prince because he is a person with “No love”, neglects the rose and makes fun of the ugly old lady. As the movie says he had “no love”, but I can add that he was a person that took everything for granted, his castle, his life, his “servants”, everything. And because of that, the old lady punishes him. She turned into a beautiful woman and cursed him turning him into a beast that needed to find true love before the age of 21 when the rose would start falling apart and he would die. This also happened to all the people living in the castle. Who turned into talking objects. 

And it is until he finally starts giving things their proper importance, and that he finds real love, that he and all the people in the castle, finally recover their “Humanity”. 

On the other hand, problems can also not be taken for granted. Just as I explained with relationships, everything comes from something else, and everything can change in the blink of an eye. Many times it can be because of your own decisions, or it can be because of things that you don’t control. But nothing should be taken for granted. 

Change is imminent, anything can happen at any time, the good things, that we should always be grateful for and we should now that the moment we are enjoying them can change at any moment, or the bad things which we can some time get rid of, and not take for granted that we are in a whole that we can not get out of. 

I love to take learnings from different cultures, people, and religions. And there are many religions that touch on this topic of taking things for granted. One of them is the Muslim religion. In this religion, it is said that there are two things that people always tend to take for granted. Those are time and health. It explains very well that time is limited, that is something that we all know, but somehow mostly young people don’t think about the time that way. It is true that we can’t let time pressure us to make different things that we also might be able to do in other moments, but we should also be grateful for each moment we are living and not just waste our time not doing anything.

 And our health, something that we all should keep in mind is that the moment will come, the older we are, that our health won’t be as good as it is, so we should appreciate and take advantage of our health and time to make everything we can and want. Also helping those who don’t have much of any of these two. These are things that make us not only have a better life in the moment, but also in the future. 

We just talked about the problems of taking things for granted, now let’s talk about the pros, the good things that get better thanks to not taking them for granted. Just by having a balance. 

For example, the new generations of kids, that were born with technology, especially with the internet. Usually, take these technologies for granted, and that makes them appreciate it less than those that lived the evolution of technology from what life was before it and how it is now. 

But those who know where the technology comes from and all the years and all that it took to have it even though they were born with it. Those are the ones that make the new technologies and take advantage of the existing ones to make a better new world. 

Another example that shows how much happiness and innovation can come from not taking things for granted, is the people that come from a third world country where their lives were in danger and had much trouble, and they move to a first world country where their lives are much more secure and ordered. For example. Latin American people when they go to Europe, don’t take anything for granted because most of the things they can now have and see they didn’t have the opportunity before at all. This way they can have much more happiness by living all these things. 

But this doesn’t apply to all of them, there are people that even by coming from other places where they had tough times, instead of looking at all the new good things they have, they focus on all the new bad things (That usually are things that were worse where they came from but they still focus on them) and still give everything for granted the moment they arrive. These people don’t live happy lives they could. 

There are also the people that live in a good place and don’t take it for granted as well, and these people don’t even need to move to another place to be happy and realize what they have, that should be the goal of many of us. 

Another example that explains the innovation that comes from not taking things for granted is: 

The example of the company Cisneros, a Venezuelan company founded in 1929 by Diego Cisneros, nowadays they are owners of many different companies in different fields. 

The current CEO Grabirela Cisneros once explained in a conference, that whenever they have trouble with a project in one particular country, the way they solve the project is by bringing a new team of international people from many other countries to tackle the problem. This mostly works because these people don’t take anything that the culture of the other country has for granted. So they can take outside of the box and come with solutions that the locals would have never think of. 

So even if you are a person that doesn’t want to go away from the country you live in right now, if you stop taking things for granted, you might be able to still be creative and innovative. 

Some example of how nowadays many people have realized things that they use to take for granted and now that they don’t have them they don’t can be seen clearly in the current pandemic. 

I talked with many different people that told me lots of different stories that have to do with this, for example: 

Many people could have thought that technology could overcome anything, that the rate technology was advancing it was impossible that any biological thing would harm us anymore, and the virus prove them wrong. It showed us that we still have a lot to grow, but thanks to that also now we can use the new learnings to grow better technologies. 

Another issue is the human interactions that changed drastically. We used to communicate touching each other a lot, especially Latin American people. Always communicate touching an arm, hugging, and other similar things, the meaning of some interactions change completely if the touch is not there, and now people have to keep distance, something that teaches us all how not even something as basic as human physical interaction can be taken by granted. So next time you have contact with people you love or with whomever you are having a conversation with, appreciate even that part of communication because everything can change in an instant, don’t take it for granted. 

Now I will explain the opposite situation, it is true that people took for granted their whole lives before the pandemic and the chaos changed it all. But now many people take the Pandemic lifestyle for granted, and that is also something that shouldn’t be. It is true that life would not go back to being the same as it was, but it won’t stay as it is now either, it will be better, we will come out of this. Change is always happening and is something we need to keep in mind for good and for bad things as well.

But how can we make it better? How can we avoid taking so many things for granted? It seems as we can only do this at the moment we already lost what we had. But it is not necessarily like that, there are many ways we can do to make it better and they change the whole perception of life after we accomplish them. 

One important thing we can do is understand where things come from and this way understand the world in a deeper way. This way no one can fool you and make you do things that don’t make any sense and only take you down the wrong path. A silly example that comes to my mind is, Understanding the way the keyboard of your computer works and is made. It works with buttons that activate electric signals that go through wires or Bluetooth to the computer which has a memory that also works with electric signals and displays what you type on a screen, this is the most basic explanation but is enough. Knowing that not all the mathematical processes and logic behind it but just by knowing that, makes you not only appreciate more the hundreds of years of discoveries, learnings, and work put together to make it work, but also it allows you to not be fooled for example from a person that tells you that you can make magic spells by typing with your keyboard when the computer is turned off. Because you know how it actually works, it might sound silly but learning how things work can help you to not end up believing something someone can say even just to manipulate you. Such as it happens with the people that end up in religious sects, usually are people with weak minds that take things for granted and just believe what others tell them is correct. 

Another way of learning how to be present and keep the joy of things is meditation, by meditating you learn how to be more present and feel all the time what you have around you. But if you don’t want to learn how to meditate, or you just tried it and you feel it is not your thing, you can always just practice reminding yourself in the middle of the day to be present, enjoy and feel what you have with you. The sounds, smells, feelings, emotions, flavors, and so on. Or just to know what you are doing and what you are touching, and appreciate where it comes from and how it works, always remembering that anything can happen at any time, this way you won’t take anything for granted.

Doing this every day in different moments, makes you be less time daily caught up in your thoughts and more in the present day, not missing a thing and not taking anything for granted. Making you happier. 

Last but not least, of course being grateful, one way of achieving this is by having a small rock in your pocket all the time. This way when you come home and empty your pockets, you will see the rock and remember to think about your day and be grateful for each thing that you can, even if the day was not that good you can always be grateful for many things in the day. 

So this way we come back to the story of how I won with my team a competition about Europe not even being a European. This in part was because we did not take things for granted in Europe because we did not have them in our own countries, but also because of something else. We did not even take the competition for granted. Most of the people were very concentrated in the competition, on their computers working on ideas or having conversations, but they seemed to be stressed about it. As if the competition was a normal thing to do and they were bored and just doing what they had to do. But we were all around the place, we had a lot of fun, the superhero we created was talking to people and being in pictures with them, we enjoyed the whole event as much as we put effort into it. Because we knew that such things as that hackathon are not to take for granted either. And that way we won the competition. 

So to be able to live the fullest life and even so things don’t come to you as a surprise, or even to be able to get out of the problems you might have, don’t take things for granted. 

Thanks for taking the time to read this article. 

Until next time.