photo by @tammyalfultis
Savoring is the psychologists’ term for staying with something good on purpose. You notice it’s good, and instead of taking that as information and moving on, you remain in it. Their phrasing is that you feel something pleasant and then feel pleasant about feeling it, which sounds like a technicality until you try it and find you almost never get to the second half.
It gets recommended constantly, and always in a way that makes it sound free. Slow down, be present, notice more. Described like that it’s something you can do anytime, which is most of the reason nobody does it now.
Photo by @dianahaguesphotography
Here’s what it actually involves. You’re outside and the light has gone gold and low the way it does at the end of August, and you notice you’re enjoying it. That’s the fork. You can register it and head back in, or you can stay four more minutes, which are four minutes of not answering the message you opened at a red light and never replied to.
Every good moment shows up in the middle of something else. There’s no clearing where you sit and savor undisturbed. It always costs you something that had a claim on you.
And the things it competes against are strong. A phone will hand you a small reward every ninety seconds, forever, and asks nothing of you. Standing outside watching the light change offers nothing on that timescale. It’s a slow thing running against fast ones, and the fast ones were built by people who are very good at their jobs.
Photo by @ninadavidson_
So why do it.
Because savoring runs backward. The moments you were fully inside stay reachable. People can go back fifteen years to one particular afternoon and get a real version of the feeling again, in the body, in the present. Researchers call it a kind of time travel and they mean it fairly literally.
But you can only return to a moment you were in. The afternoons you moved through quickly aren’t stored anywhere, and there’s nothing to go back to, because you were barely there the first time.
So the four minutes outside aren’t really costing you the message. They’re buying you an evening you can walk back into when you’re sixty.
That’s a good trade. It’s still a trade, and it doesn’t get easier, which is why it works better as a decision you make than a mood you wait around for.