"Not coincidentally, the disciplines that direct your attention to something large and awe-inspiring, whether called God or universe, consciousness or commonweal, also focus you on the improvement of your self and your world and on the appreciation of life."
"Thoreau says, “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” "
"Indeed, like William James, Buddha was a profound psychologist and philosopher whose insights grew out of a dark personal epiphany: no matter who you are, you and everyone you love must endure pain, sickness, aging, and death."
"In developing what is arguably less a religion than a philosophy for the relief of human suffering, Buddha recognized the strong bottom-up salience of anger, fear, and sadness, which are rooted in the past or future."
"“They were trying to get to the next moment,” he says, “which they believed would be better than this one. It’s a form of collective madness.” The first of many bursts of laughter resounds in the big space."
"not “up there” to be perceived in some hazy future paradise but experienced “down here,” right now"
"Considering that this moment is all that there is, he says, we might as well pay attention to it “Can you allow the present to be as it is? Make friends with it?”"
"becoming a better person and creating a better world by cultivating what previous generations unabashedly called virtues."
"support the experience of Ebenezer Scrooge: it’s never too late to focus on becoming a better person."
" “Aristotle taught that you work on developing virtues over your whole life, but you don’t really display them until middle age.” "
"Thus, when you stifle a harsh comment or put a problem in the proper perspective, you label it correctly as “self-control” or “wisdom.”"
"When Emerson wrote, “Make yourself necessary to someone,” he anticipated modern research that strongly correlates altruism with well-being."
"you become self-regulating by being self-regulating, by forgoing or delaying gratification. Because temperance is difficult to develop and requires your deliberate action, he says, “attention plays a particularly important role.”
"“It’s all me, me, me and pleasure, pleasure, pleasure,” says Peterson, “but there’s lots of evidence that that’s what makes people unhappy.”"
"To the poet W. H. Auden, “To pray is to pay attention or, shall we say, to ‘listen’ to someone or something other than oneself.”"
" PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, AND psychology not only focus you on a larger reality and the creation of a better self and world, but also, albeit more recently for psychology, on the often overlooked fact that life is good and meant to be appreciated. As Albert Einstein put it, “There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”"
"When Fred Bryant, a psychologist at Chicago’s Loyola University, combed his field’s archives for research on pleasure, what little information there was suggested that the point of enjoyment is to serve as an occasional “breather” that helps get you through hard times. Dissatisfied with this bleak conclusion, Bryant began to study a form of rapt attention that he calls “savoring,” or the mindful, intentional focus on positive feelings: “If you can’t say, ‘Yes, I was aware of and attended to that pleasure,’ it’s not savoring.”"
"Research on savoring shows that your sense of satisfaction depends more on your top-down focus, whether it’s enjoying the first day of spring or stewing over a bitchy relative’s behavior, than on your circumstances, such as whether you’re rich or poor, sick or well."
"The point, says Bryant, is that “you see what you look for. And you can train yourself to attend to the joy out there waiting to be had, instead of passively waiting for it to come to you.”"
"If you want to savor, you can focus on an internal feeling, as when you thrill with joy, bask in pride, swell with gratitude, or marvel in awe. You can also attend to a sensory pleasure, such as gazing at a rainbow or letting a great piece of chocolate melt in your mouth. Recalling a man who took a special delight in concrete sidewalks, Bryant says, “One person can enjoy something that no one else could. Savoring reveals the tremendous creativity of the human mind.”"
"Whether you’re focused on your ice cream cone or your Nobel Prize, the experience’s beginning and ending offer the best savoring opportunities. Initially, sheer novelty grabs your attention, as do later cues that something is almost finished. Those first and last few bites of cake, rays of light, or days of vacation prompt you to appreciate what you have and then, are about to lose. “Like the songs put it, you don’t know what you had till it’s lost,” says Bryant. “You want to wring out all the joy that you can from a good experience.”
"Despite our great potential for attending to life’s pleasures, it often remains largely untapped. As Robert Louis Stevenson observed, “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” At one end of the savoring spectrum are people who never relish anything, says Bryant: “They can take a beautiful day and run it into the ground.” At the opposite end are the lucky individuals, particularly older people, who take delight in little things, like pancakes for breakfast or a stupid pet trick."
"Despite their generally lower socioeconomic status worldwide, women savor more than men. One reason could be that females usually get more encouragement to feel and express emotion than males, who are generally trained to have a stiff-upper-lip, action-oriented approach to life. As Bryant puts it, “Why would a guy bask in pleasure when there’s more work to be done?”"
"As he points out, however, “No moment comes twice. If you don’t attend to it, you miss it. If you want to smell the roses, you have to linger.”"
"Then too, he says, “just because something bad is happening doesn’t mean lots of good things aren’t also. They’re two very different phenomena. The joy and meaning you find in life and the current stressor—an illness, a troubled relative, a career setback—are separate concerns, and you can experience both.”"
"The best strategy for savoring is learning to pay rapt attention to carefully chosen top-down targets. To practice this skill, Bryant suggests taking a “daily vacation”: spending twenty to thirty minutes focusing on something you enjoy or suspect you might but have never done. Then, at the end of the day, you revisit and relish that pleasurable interlude and plan the next sojourn. After seven days, he says, “most people say, ‘What a great week! I wish I could do that all of the time!’ Well, why not?”"
"Actually, I’ve come to feel that paying rapt attention is life, at least at its best."
"Focused is how we want to feel. The evidence is all around us, from the calm yet alert faces of athletes “in the zone” to mothers cradling their babies, tradesmen bent over their work, musicians playing their instruments. In Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese’s documentary on the Rolling Stones, when Keith Richards is asked how he feels when he emerges on-stage to confront a hundred thousand screaming fans, he says simply, “I wake up.”"
"In life’s best moments, whether we’re writing a book or a letter, making love or dinner, that’s how we are, too: awake, focused, rapt."
"Aware of our limited focusing capacity, I take pains to ensure that electronic media and machines aren’t in charge of mine. When I need to learn and remember certain information, do difficult work, or acquire a new skill, I shield myself from such distractions for at least ninety minutes at a stretch. If I tense up over a big decision, I remember the fortune-cookie rule: nothing is as important as I think it is when I’m focusing on it."
"Most important, I’ve become much more aware of how the way I feel affects what I pay attention to and vice versa. Depending on my emotional state du jour, I might barely notice the stack of dirty dishes that someone has dumped in the sink or perceive it as a smoldering Mt. Vesuvius. Should the latter reaction prevail, I’ve learned that I can ameliorate its consequences for all concerned by refocusing on the situation in a different light—the party responsible is not an awful person but perhaps only distracted by a big project—or by shifting my attention to something else for a while. Simple as it sounds, this strategy is surprisingly effective."
"I needn’t stay focused on outrageous fortune’s slings and arrows."
"To paraphrase John Milton, “Heaven or hell?” It will depend on what we focus on."
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