Author Oliver Burkeman and his family recently moved from Brooklyn to the North York Moors in northern England.
“Which means that very often in the early mornings, carrying a flask of hot coffee, I get to stroll along a lane with spectacular views across a valley to the heather-topped ridge beyond,” he writes in Meditations for Mortals.
“In winter, the pink light of sunrise pours itself slowly over fields buried in snow; regularly, in spring and summer, a barn owl swoops low across my path,” Oliver writes.
“It’s a magical landscape, and one I’ve loved since childhood.”
What’s surprising about this experience?
We’d “be surprised at how frequently I find a way to feel bad about this,” Oliver notes.
“Or maybe we wouldn’t,” he writes, “since this tendency to turn delightful experiences into stressful ones is rather widespread.”
It goes like this. . .
“This is amazing! This is the kind of place in which I’ve always wanted to live, and the kind of thing I’ve always wanted to do in the early mornings—so I’d better make sure I’m getting the most out of it, and also, do whatever I can to make sure I can keep having this sort of experience forever, because it’s slipping away already!”
As Oliver is thinking these thoughts, he feels “a clenching or a gripping, an attempt to grasp hold of what’s happening so as to mine it for as much value as possible, and somehow to claim ownership of it for myself.
“Needless to say,” he observes, “this is a suboptimal way to have an enjoyable experience.”
2: We try to hold onto a moment. But, of course, we cannot.
“That’s what’s going on whenever we fail to savor a moment in nature, or with a newborn, or while eating an exceptional meal,” Oliver explains, “because we’re too focused on trying to savor it, or somehow extend it into the future.”
We experience a similar feeling when we come to the end of a day during which we’ve been extremely productive. We’ve crossed everything off our to-do list. We’ve stuck to our fitness routine. We’ve eaten healthy meals.
“But instead of thinking ‘What a great day!’ and luxuriating in our achievements,” he observes, “we find ourselves thinking: ‘Yes! Now that’s the kind of day I’m aiming for, and now it’s my job to make sure that this is merely the first of many such days to come!’
“Congratulations,” Oliver writes, we’ve “turned a potential source of easy delight into a cause of further stress.”
Once again, we’re “tightening around the experience in order to try to get more out of it,” he suggests, “an additional level of enjoyment, motivation for future triumphs, or something else.
“Yet the reality, so easy to grasp on an intellectual level, is that it’s detrimental to approach good experiences like this: They’re for living, not holding on to.”
Another version of this mindset occurs when we focus on collecting experiences rather than enjoying them.
“It’s nice to collect memories, of course,” Oliver notes, “but the way to do that isn’t to go about trying to collect them. It’s living them as fully as possible, so as to remember them vividly later.”
Sarah Manguso captures the essence of this type of thinking, “Perhaps all anxiety,” she writes, “might derive from a fixation on moments—an inability to accept life as ongoing.”
That’s what Oliver is resisting when he tells himself he wants to look out over the gorgeous vista “forever.”
“I’m denying my finitude in a rather obvious way,” he notes, “because even if I were never to move house again and to live to the age of 130, there’d be no ‘forever’ about it. That would just be a few more decades of morning coffees, a less-than-invisible speck of time against the backdrop of the eons.
“All my clenching and grasping would have done precisely nothing to render the experience permanent.”
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At the end of each week, we are exploring some of the life lessons Oliver shares in his wonderful book Meditations for Mortals.
Trying to hold onto the moment is quite different from “the spirit of the Japanese tea ceremony, in which fleetingness is understood not as a threat to what’s unfolding,” Oliver writes, “but as the source of its value.
“The exquisite precision of the ritual,” he writes, “is intended to articulate and to honor the unrepeatable, unhoardable nature of the moment in which it occurs,”
The nineteenth-century Japanese statesman Ii Naosuke put it this way: “Great attention should be given to a tea gathering, which we can speak of as ‘one time, one meeting’. . .
“Even though the host and guests may see each other often socially, one day’s gathering can never be repeated exactly,” Ii Naosuke notes.
“Viewed this way, the meeting is indeed a once-in-a-lifetime occasion.”
We can experience dozens of tea ceremonies. Even with the same people.
“But we can only have that ceremony, that cup of tea, once,” Oliver reflects. “Then that stretch of time evaporates forever.”
Which is how life unfolds. If we “could return to it whenever we liked, for as long as we liked,” he notes, “it would be vastly less precious.
“The transience is the whole point,” Oliver writes.
Embracing this reality brings happiness.
“On the days when I allow myself to move through life in this unclenched way,” Oliver writes, “things are much more naturally enjoyable, because I’m not trying to make myself appreciate them, or self-consciously feel grateful for them.
“The less I’m trying to get something out of an experience,” he notes, “the more I find I can get into it, and the more I can be present for other people involved in it.”
Yes, it is sad when a beautiful moment slips away.
“But it’s the flavor of sadness conveyed by the Japanese phrase ‘mono no aware,'” Oliver writes, “a wistful pathos at the transience of things, the kind of poignant sadness that deepens an experience instead of detracting from it.
“The kind we feel once we’re no longer grasping at the moment, thereby undermining our experience of it, but stepping more fully into it. Feeling ourselves a part of it. Being it.”
Indeed.
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Reflection: What might I experience more fully if, instead of trying to hold onto a perfect moment, I simply allowed it to unfold and pass?
Action: Practice unclenching around one cherished experience this week—whether it’s a shared meal, a sunrise, or quiet time—and just be present for it without trying to make it last.
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