Off the Clock by Laura Vanderkam

Author:Laura Vanderkam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

Learn to Savor

That’s how to stop being late. But lingering isn’t just about ending the rushing caused by knowing you are supposed to be somewhere ten miles away and you aren’t even in your car. It is about actively savoring the present, and thus stretching your experience of time.

To savor is to feel pleasure, and also to appreciate that you are feeling pleasure. It takes normal gratification and adds a second layer to it, acknowledgment. That this appreciation expands time can be understood by thinking of the opposite. When you want time to pass quickly, you might wish yourself elsewhere. When you want to prolong something, you hold yourself right where you are. Survey respondents who strongly agreed that they felt present rather than distracted the day before were 35 percent more likely than average to say that they generally had time for things that they wanted to do.

Being present means thinking about what is going on. It means taking in your surroundings. You know it still cannot last forever, as nothing lasts forever. You become like Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, taking in the end of her triumphant dinner party. “With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked,” Virginia Woolf wrote. You know you are watching the present enter the past. Yet still you stand there watching the fading. You savor the moment. You linger.

This concept of savoring—a word much like lingering, with a slightly more pleasurable connotation—turns out to be a critical component in the field of positive psychology. Psychologists have long studied how resilient people learn to cope with difficulty. But it is an equally interesting adaptation to learn how to savor the good. Some people can take a good experience and take steps to make it richer and last longer.

Intriguingly, the richest experiences of savoring involve an awareness of the past and the future, as well as the present. In their 2006 book Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience, two of the leading researchers in this field, Fred B. Bryant and the late Joseph Veroff, share Bryant’s account of summiting 14,000-plus-foot Snowmass Mountain in the Colorado Rockies. He was in awe of the physical grandeur, of course, the snowcapped peaks looking like a frozen sea where “wave after wave of silver-tipped crests merge with green-blanketed valleys in the distant haze.” He and his friends stood silent, marveling. But Bryant also knew he would likely never be there again. He had already tried to summit Snowmass twice and failed, and so he did more than just enjoy the view. He embraced his friends and told them how happy he was to share this moment with them. He looked back into the past, recalling a back injury that had almost ended his climbing career. He let his mind go to a time when he thought he would never experience this moment. “The realization that it is here now intensifies my joy,” he thought.

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