“
“
It’s moments of
silence … that can start
to open up all kinds
of doors. You’ll get,
ironically, the fast pay-
off of the enjoyment,
the recharging, the
replenishing of having
a slow moment.
CARL HONORÉ
do that if you’re overburdened, if you’re over-
scheduled, if you’re doing too many things.”
He continues: “I think what’s o;en miss-
ing is that real, deep living. And it’s when we
slow down and we’re fully engaged when we’re
doing things, that we remember them. And so
much about a life well-lived is memory.”
The art of savoring
;e importance of creating happy memories is not lost on Fred Bryant, a social psychologist at Chicago’s Loyola University, who, for
more than three decades, has been researching
savoring—particularly how an experience gets
translated and transformed into happiness and
good memories.
His research often involves presenting
people with pizza or chocolate and telling
them that their assignment is to enjoy that
food as much as possible. Bryant says that the
;rst thing people do is slow down.
“When people want to enjoy something,
they try to make it last. ;ey try to stretch the
experience out,” he says.
Unfortunately, today’s pace of doing as
much as possible in as short a time as possible
is the antithesis of savoring. “If you want to
smell the roses, you have to stop,” says Bryant.
“You can’t drive by, just roll the window down
and say, ‘Well, that was great.’
“[Busyness] robs us of the desire to linger.
It tells us that … if you’re not doing something,
you’re wasting time, which is crazy. Time is
time. You can just spend it in a di;erent way. It
never gets hoarded and saved,” he continues.
Bryant’s advice for savoring is to take the
time to build mental pictures: “It’s in the build-
ing of the mental photo that you notice the © S H
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A mindful minute
MEDITATION INSTRUCTOR Sharon Salzberg
offers the following tips and “stealth meditations”
to infuse mindfulness into the workday.
Take a lunch break. This is your personal
time to take a mental break from work and recharge for the afternoon, so take advantage of it.
Be realistic about your time. You can’t
do 15 hours of work in an eight-hour day.
Read an entire email twice before
composing a response.
Experience the transition to work as
a journey.—SEP
Reprinted with permission from Real Happiness
at Work, by Sharon Salzberg (Workman, 2014;
not available at Costco).
things that you want to remember—the joyous, beautiful things that are worth savoring.
;at helps you focus on them and enjoy the
moment more—not only in the moment, but
later on.”
Mighty mindfulness
Giving yourself to a good experience
sounds easy, but what if being still requires
paying attention to nothing more than your
breath or, worse, creates negative or uncomfortable feelings?
Meditation expert, author and Costco
member Sharon Salzberg (sharonsalzberg.
com) points to a University of Virginia study
in which participants, when given the choice
of spending six to 15 minutes in a room with
nothing to do but think or receive electric
shocks, more o;en opted for the shocks.
While it may be initially uncomfortable,
mindfulness—the act of being aware of what’s
going on at a particular moment without
assigning judgment to what you’re feeling—
and mindful meditation have been shown to
have a variety of bene;ts. (For more on mindful meditation in ;e Connection, see “
Mindful matters,” July 2014. At Costco.com, enter
“Connection”; at Online Edition, click on
“Back Issues” and search “meditation.”)
“I do think [mindfulness] has the potential
to help people,” Salzberg tells ;e Connection.
“If you’re having a hard time at work and
things are really confused, agitated or angry,
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