"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures."  -- Thornton Wilder

Mention the winter holidays, and "home" typically springs to mind. The word can be emotionally loaded, but to the luckiest among us it connotes family, comfort, shelter and security. All rolled into four cozy letters of the alphabet.

Despite our fickle economy, the Royal Oak housing market has been good to my family over the past 28 years. So, last week I made a short pilgrimage across 12 Mile Road, deliberately pausing by the first two houses Doug and I called home in this community. The first was our newlywed nest on Roseland, located just a block from the National Shrine of the Little Flower Catholic Church. The second was nearby, on Benjamin Ave.

Our home-improvement budget was relatively small in the early years of our marriage, but Doug and I had plenty of elbow grease and wallpaper paste to invest.

We lived in our Roseland "starter home" barely two years before putting it up for sale. It seemed cramped at the time, even for the two of us. (Never mind that the elderly woman who'd sold the house to us had happily raised two daughters there.) Like most young couples, we'd been brainwashed into thinking we needed more of everything. We had to have a nursery, a home office, a bigger kitchen and a two-car garage. So we moved to the slightly larger place on Benjamin.

Driving around the 'hood on my pilgrimage, I got to thinking: Did we realize how lovely those two homes were while we lived in them?

How often did I step back to admire the sweet floral wallpaper we'd struggled to put up in the bathroom of the first house? Or the funky brick-red tile we installed in the kitchen?

Driving past our second home on Benjamin, I noticed how the landscaping had matured since we moved. And I wondered: Had I been too busy working and raising a child to pause and inhale the deep purple lilacs blooming every spring in the old backyard?

Did I fully appreciate the gift of home ownership back then?

Of course, I've always believed I'm a very fortunate woman. For years -- at Oprah's suggestion -- I've kept an ongoing gratitude list in a composition notebook. But there's an important difference between listing one's blessings on paper and slowing down long enough to actually savor them.  Appreciating what we already have and what we've accomplished is an art. In order to practice it successfully, we need to make the time and space for reflection.

In her new memoir,  Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas & Found Happiness (Atlas & Co., $23), Dominique Browning recalls how losing her job as editor in chief of House & Garden magazine radically changed her outlook on life.

After running for nearly 13 years on the editorial fast track, the author didn't know what to do with so much unstructured time on her hands. But as Browning explains it, she soon rediscovered the pleasure of "focusing attention on the simplest things, available to all of us, at any time, should we choose to fully engage: family, friendship, food, music, art, books, our bodies, our minds, our souls, and the life that blooms and buzzes all around us."

Browning also reminds us that we shouldn't wait until we lose a job – or anything else we value – to review this lesson. "Slow love," she writes, "is about knowing what you've got before it's gone."

It occurs to me that I'm usually so hell-bent on arriving at my next destination, or meeting a new goal, that I don't take enough time to reflect on what I've earned so far. I'm like the kid who rushes through a memorized prayer at the Thanksgiving dinner table, oblivious to what the words really mean.

Like most Americans, I was taught early on that "resting on our laurels" is a waste of time. Our fiercely competitive culture suggests that we're only as valuable as our last major achievement -- as if our worth were measured in trophies, paychecks, promotions and ... bigger houses.  No wonder many of us feel disconnected and vaguely unsatisfied. No wonder we're always trying to upgrade everything we own, sometimes before we've had time to enjoy the heck out of it.

So, if gratitude is a prayer, appreciation is the long pause that comes before it.  And now that the holiday season is off to its usual frantic start, I'll try to slow down long enough to consider the everyday blessings that make me happiest -- including the home I live in now.