I read Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project a few years ago. That’s the book where Rubin decides what habits, practices, or changes she would like to incorporate into her life over the course of a year, and sets about assimilating them into her daily routine month by month. It’s a little My Year of Living Biblically meets A Month of Sundays, only without the extremism of the former or the soft-focus religion of the latter.
There are many take-aways from Rubin’s book, but one thing really stuck with me: the idea that the pleasure we take from an event is only partially derived from the event itself; the balance of the pleasure comes from the hatching of the idea, the planning of it, the anticipation of it, and the afterglow. It’s just another way of saying, ”It’s the journey that counts,” but with some measure of happiness research mixed in. While reveling in the pleasures of anticipation seems suspiciously like not living in the moment at all, Rubin’s point—and the point of everyone from Tolle to Chodron to Thoreau to LaPorte to God–is that every moment is a moment. Or, to say it the same way only differently, every moment is a moment.
Which brings me, rather longwindedly, to what I actually want to address, which is how easy it is to let celebratory moments go by without celebrating. It’s something my husband and I were talking about last week. I have a publishing job that goes on hiatus two months every summer, and last week marked the beginning of my two months’ time-off. Feeling celebratory, I gathered up 3 friends and my husband and we went to our favorite dinner spot, Canyon Grill, on the back side of Lookout Mountain, where I ate wood grilled trout and fire-seared red cabbage and a baby lettuce salad that I could have made myself but didn’t, and we drank three bottles of wine and laughed for three hours and then went home. I loved it. I also loved the entire week leading up to it, and my husband and I are still replaying funny stories from it four days later.
Was it such a big deal, reaching the beginning of my summer, that it needed to be marked by dinner out with friends? Not really. And yes. The point is not to assign worth to moments but to attempt to live fully inside of each one. When I fully “got” this, I stopped being in a huge hurry all the time. I lost my impatience, my agitation, and my dissociative states. I even stopped tailgating. You don’t have to send up a huge hurrah every minute you don’t die. It’s really about being here–quietly or loudly, whichever brings you the most fully alive–for the ride.
