By Raj Mistry
I recently travelled to Banaras, and somewhere along the way, I lost my slippers.
At first, it was just an inconvenience—something small and silly. I could have bought another pair, but instead I decided to spend the entire day without them, partly out of curiosity and partly because I thought it would be an interesting experience.
What started as a small inconvenience ended up teaching me a lesson I had never expected.
As I walked barefoot through the streets of Varanasi, I started noticing the road differently. Every stone, every broken tile, every puddle, every piece of waste, and every uneven surface suddenly mattered. Things I had walked over hundreds of times without thinking were now demanding my attention.
When you walk with slippers, you are protected from most of those things. You move quickly and casually because your feet are shielded from the ground. You don’t need to think about every step.
But once that protection disappears, your awareness changes.
I suddenly realised that my slippers had been doing something incredibly important every day without me noticing. They protected my feet, and because they did their job so quietly, I had completely stopped appreciating them.
That made me think about how much of life works the same way.
We Appreciate Things After They Stop Protecting Us
We often don’t appreciate something while it is quietly working in our favour. We notice it when it stops.
We complain about our food being boring until we don’t have enough food to eat. We complain about our routine until we lose the stability that routine provided. We complain about a small house until we no longer have a place to call home.
The problem is that our minds become accustomed to comfort.
Something that protects us every day eventually becomes invisible to us.
The same thing happens with health. When our body works normally, we rarely think about the ability to walk, breathe, see, hear, speak, or simply get through the day without pain. These abilities become so ordinary that we stop seeing them as blessings.
It often takes an injury, illness, or temporary limitation to make us realise how much we were receiving without noticing.
You don’t need to lose something permanently to understand its value. Sometimes even a brief interruption is enough to wake you up.
The Things We Notice Only When They’re Gone
Think about the people in your life.
Parents. Friends. Partners. Children. Colleagues. People who call you, check on you, listen to you, or simply exist somewhere in your everyday life.
Because they are there regularly, their presence can become part of the background.
And because they are part of the background, we sometimes stop treating them with the attention they deserve.
We become impatient. We speak harshly. We take our frustration out on them because we assume they will understand. We postpone spending time with them because we believe there will always be another day.
Then something changes.
Someone moves away. A relationship ends. A person stops calling. Circumstances change. And suddenly, the things that felt ordinary become the things we miss the most.
Loss has a strange ability to sharpen our vision.
The person didn’t necessarily become more valuable after they left. We simply became more aware of the value that was already there.
Our Minds Get Used to Comfort
There is a psychological reason this happens.
Humans adapt to repeated experiences. When something becomes familiar, our brain pays less attention to it. This process is often discussed through the idea of hedonic adaptation—our tendency to become accustomed to positive changes and return toward our usual emotional baseline.
That is why something exciting can feel extraordinary when we first experience it but ordinary after a while.
A new phone feels special for a few days. A new car eventually becomes the car you drive every morning. A comfortable home becomes simply “home.”
The same process can affect our relationships, routines, health, and even the basic abilities we use every day.
Our brain doesn’t constantly celebrate what is working.
It simply expects it to keep working.
And that expectation can make us careless.
Walking Barefoot Changed the Way I Saw My Surroundings
There was another lesson in walking barefoot that had nothing to do with gratitude.
It made me notice how we treat the spaces around us.
When you walk barefoot, a piece of broken glass isn’t just litter. It becomes a danger. A puddle isn’t just water on the road. It becomes something you have to step around. A broken tile isn’t just poor maintenance. You feel it directly.
That made me think about how many problems we create for other people without ever experiencing them ourselves.
We throw waste onto roads because our feet are protected from it. We spill water without thinking about the person who might slip. We leave objects in walkways because we don’t consider the person who may trip over them.
We often understand the consequences of our actions only when we experience them ourselves.
For one day, my feet became the reminder.
Imagine if everyone experienced their surroundings that way, even occasionally. Perhaps we would become more careful—not because someone told us to be responsible, but because we finally understood what our carelessness feels like to someone else.
What If We Practised Gratitude Before Loss?
The bigger lesson isn’t that we should walk barefoot.
It is that we shouldn’t need to lose something before we start appreciating it.
Look at your life today.
You may have a body that allows you to move freely. A home that protects you. People who care about you. Food on your table. A job, even if you complain about it. A routine, even if it sometimes feels boring. A mind that allows you to think, learn, remember, laugh, and experience the world.
None of these things are guaranteed forever.
That doesn’t mean we should live in fear of losing them. It means we should be present enough to notice them while we still have them.
Appreciation doesn’t require pretending that everything is perfect.
You can dislike your job and still appreciate having an income. You can want a bigger house and still appreciate having a home. You can want to improve your health while being grateful that your body carries you through another day.
Gratitude doesn’t mean giving up ambition.
It means refusing to let ambition make you blind.
Final Realisation
Walking barefoot through the streets of Banaras for one day taught me something surprisingly simple.
My slippers had been protecting me every day, and because they never asked for attention, I had stopped noticing them.
Maybe life is full of things like that.
Our health.
Our homes.
Our relationships.
Our ability to walk.
Our ability to see and hear.
Our ordinary routines.
The people who keep showing up.
We often realise their value only when something changes.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
You don’t have to lose something to appreciate it.
You don’t have to experience absence to understand presence.
You don’t have to wait for life to take something away before you finally notice what it was giving you.
Sometimes the lesson is not about what you lost.
It’s about what you had been failing to notice.
Maybe all we need is to take a few steps without our slippers—and pay attention to what our feet are telling us.
