Day Dreaming Appreciates

My semi-regular keeping of this online log led me on a path thinking about the value of day dreaming and appreciation. I was considering the many times as a child that I began the process of recording my life in a journal, through my youth I must have taken up this task upwards of 15 times. I was never able to keep focused and interested for a very long period of time, so my journals would end up as failed projects which soon fell by the wayside and were lost. The fact that every attempt to journal ended with another notebook with 5 to 7 entries and nothing more may have served as discouragement from again taking up the task, but it never fully defeated my desire to do so.
The desire to take up a task which doesn't come naturally had me spending some of my time thinking about how that desire comes about. I believe that my desire to keep a journal comes in part from appreciation of the craft. Even as a young man unable to stay focused on a journal I was always appreciative of the craft of journaling. I always admired memoirs and daily logs kept by various people that I came in contact with directly or indirectly. From a Distant relative who kept a civil war journal to later in life, my grandfather's record of his daily meanderings.
My first journal attempts came very young in life, around the age 7 or 8. At that time my appreciation was very 2 dimensional but romantic. Based from television and movies, where characters who's lives I admired recorded their thoughts in journals which played back in voice over narration. I hadn't at that time began to really understand and appreciate the value of recording thoughts and daily happenings, but because I admired it I was able to remain open to it even while becoming frustrated by repeated failed attempts.

Admiring a craft, art or skill is the beginning of appreciating it. Once you appreciate it you have placed personal value in it. The value then placed makes you interested, you will listen when someone talks about that thing, you will seek out more information. Through that you will learn about different ways of doing that thing you admired and one day you will be able to diffuse all that information down to a practical workable format to engage in that which you might have initially started to do and failed at.
My personal value placed on journaling led me to keep up with it's varied formats which led me to first acquaint myself with blogging.
This is what I see as one of the many usefull effects of day dreaming. Letting the mind wander where it will go through out the day can often point you to areas that you are interested in and things which you are able to appreciate. If one day you notice that you've been thinking about something a great deal then you will recognize the desire behind that, which for me is the equivalent of naming something when it's brought to life. This can apply to a vast and varried section of our daily lives. Just recently the amount of times I thought to myself and wished that I were running again became so present in my mind that I took up the activity again, which in turn has made me happier in the last few weeks than I had been before. So the act of listening to my own mind in this instance became an agent for positive change.
I've come to recognize that this pattern of first admiring an action, then appreciating it has led to my evenutaully being in a a measurable way capable in that action, or even successful in that action. My admiration for musicians and led to me becoming one. My admiration for music itself led to me creating my own. Music never came to me simply or easily, and it was horribly frustrating at times, and it still is, but I have placed such a high value in it that I am always willing to try. The same goes for running, I have come to appreciate it on such a deep level that when I wasn't doing it was always present in my mind as what I believe to be an essential component of a well lived life. As a boy I had a hard time reading. I read slow and poorly, it did not come fast nor easy, but I always admired those people that did it, and they led me to what has become one of the most enjoyable ways I have to spend my time. I love reading, and you can't love something with out valuing it greatly.
This pattern has greatly effected the person that I've become too. The character of others who I admire and appreciate is the character I will always try and incorporate into my own being. Simply put it has made me a better person.
While engaging in the practice of listening to my mind, and in considering others I've become aware of a difference between day dreaming for sheer entertainment of a bored mind and actively day dreaming. It's easy to get caught up in dreaming about the outcome of a particular task or accomplishment rather than then appreciating what it takes to attain it.
If I were to just think of running as a means to getting a hot body then I would overlook the actually act of running and then spend time just considering how many wonderful new doors my new body would open fo me. Then I would spend time entertaining my mind by thinking up new things to put behind those doors, which is really inactive day dreaming, it's like watching bad TV in your mind. It may pass time but in the end the time just passed and it's then forever lost.