Life Glee / Getting in the Way of Yourself

Rushing through the good part to reach the next thing

The most common way a pleasure is lost is not distraction but speed.

There is a particular habit of finishing a good thing quickly in order to get on with the schedule, even when the schedule contains nothing urgent. The meal is eaten at pace, the walk is completed briskly, the sit down lasts four minutes because there is a queue of small tasks waiting and they exert a pull out of all proportion to their importance. Nothing is being enjoyed less because of pressure from outside. The pressure is internal and mostly habitual, and it operates hardest on exactly the parts of the day that would repay slowing down.

It helps to notice that the queue is not real in the way it feels. The tasks are not standing there tapping their feet. They will be identical in ten minutes. The sense of being pursued through a pleasant moment by an admin backlog is a familiar feeling and a poor description of the actual situation, which is that nothing whatever depends on the next ten minutes. Seeing this clearly does not always change the behaviour, but it changes the story about why the behaviour happens.

The practical version is unglamorous: when you notice you are hurrying through something you like, for no reason, stop hurrying. That is all. It works perhaps a third of the time and a third is plenty, given that the alternative is a day in which every good part has been compressed to fit around tasks that did not need the space.