I eat too fast. I always have. Put a plate of food in front of me and apparently I’m concerned someone is going to take it away.
When I was younger, my father, God rest his soul, used to tell me not to wash my food down. He’d watch me take a bite and immediately grab my water, using it to soften everything up so I could swallow faster and get another bite in. I don’t think I was actually that hungry. I think I was more worried about finishing my meal and getting on with whatever I had decided was more important than eating or spending time with the family at the dinner table.
Recently, I’ve been asking myself a question: How often do I experience something while simultaneously thinking about what’s next?
Camping, but thinking about when I need to leave or what I need to do when I get home. Dinner, but checking my phone. A conversation, but already forming my response. A beautiful drive, but focused on the destination.
A weekend with my girl, but still thinking about Monday.
There are moments with her lately when I catch myself thinking, This is really fucking nice. Nothing profound is happening. We’re talking, driving somewhere, holding hands, sitting together, eating, laughing about something stupid. I’m learning not to immediately ask what comes next.
Sometimes this is what comes next.
I think I’ve spent a lot of my life waiting for the next thing. The next weekend. The next vacation. The next job. The next project. The next event. The next thing I need to fix, accomplish, plan or figure out.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with looking forward to things. Anticipation can be half the fun. But there is something a little fucked up about spending Monday waiting for Friday, then spending the weekend thinking about Monday.
Eventually you can rush through a whole lot of life that way.
Maybe that’s what I’m starting to understand about savoring something. It doesn’t mean I have to stop everything, light a candle, meditate and become one with the fucking universe every time something nice happens. Sometimes it just means recognizing that I’m in a moment I don’t need to rush through.
That’s harder for me than it probably sounds.
My brain likes projects. It likes problems. It likes figuring out what needs to happen next. Give me a problem and I’ll happily spend six hours solving it, even if a reasonable person would have walked away five hours and forty minutes earlier.
Sitting still and simply enjoying something doesn’t always give my brain enough to do.
I’m getting better at it.
And I don’t think savoring means I suddenly have to become a slow-moving, peaceful person who wanders through life admiring flowers and refusing to make plans. That’s probably not going to happen. I like projects. I like having somewhere to go. I like having something to look forward to.
Maybe I just need to get better at knowing when there’s no reason to hurry.
There are times with my girlfriend when we’re sitting together and I realize I don’t particularly want anything else from the moment. I don’t need us to be doing something exciting. I don’t need a destination. I don’t need the conversation to lead to some profound discovery about ourselves or our relationship.
I just like being there with her.
That’s it.
And maybe I’ve underestimated how important that’s it can be.
Yesterday I wrote about fragility and how the things that matter to us aren’t necessarily permanent. I don’t want that realization to make me afraid of losing them. I’d rather have it make me better at noticing them while they’re here.
My boys aren’t little anymore. My parents got older. I got older despite repeatedly objecting to the process. Careers changed. Relationships changed. Houses changed. Friends came and went. There were thousands of ordinary days that didn’t seem particularly important while I was living them.
Looking back, some of those ordinary days are the ones I’d give almost anything to experience one more time. Not because something extraordinary happened.
Because nothing did.
We were just there.
Maybe savoring life isn’t about making every moment special. That sounds exhausting as hell. Maybe it’s about occasionally realizing that a moment is already special without requiring it to do anything else.
Hold her hand a little longer. Stay at the campsite another hour. Put the phone down during dinner. Take the long way home. Let the conversation wander. Watch the sunset without immediately reaching for the camera.
And apparently, chew my freakin’ food.
My dad had a point. He told me to slow down and taste my food when I was a kid. It just took fifty-something years to realize he may have been talking about more than dinner.
I don’t need to wash everything down so I can hurry to the next bite.
Sometimes I should probably just taste the one that’s already in my mouth.