Let a Good Moment be Enough - Daily Wisdom #63

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I am Chen Lee, author of the blog word of Taoism on Substack, and you're listening to my podcast. Every spring, the Japanese Weather Services publish a forecast that has nothing to do with rain. It is called the Sakura Zensen, the cherry blossom front, and it is tracked across the country the way we would track a storm system. It starts in the south in late March and moves north over the following weeks, and the bulletins give dates and percentages, first bloom, full bloom, and people plan around them the way you would plan around a wedding. Because when the trees open, the whole country goes outside. Blutar Paulins appear under the branches in the parks. Officers send the most junior colleague ahead in the morning to sit on a good spot until everyone arrives after work. People eat and drink and stay out late under the flowers, and this is Hanami, flower viewing, and it has been going on for well over a thousand years. The blossom lasts about a week, sometimes less. One hard rain on the wrong night takes most of it down, and everybody knows this. Nobody has ever spread a tarp all in under those trees believing that this year it might hold, or that with better planning they could stretch it to a month. The falling is not the disappointing part of the festival. In the poetry and the painting, the falling is very often the point. The petals coming down on the water and on the shoulders of people's coats and into the food. There's a term in Japanese aesthetics, monono aware, usually translated as something like the pathos of things, and it names precisely this, with the tenderness we feel towards something, because it is passing. So an entire country arranges its spring around a flower that will be gone in a week, and considers this the best thing about it. Now, imagine an evening outdoors in late summer, a long table four or five people you're genuinely glad to be with. Somewhere in the second hour, you hear yourself say it, we should do this more often. It is a lovely sentence, it is made entirely of affection, and in the half second, it takes to say you have left the table and gone into the calendar, where you are now checking September against everyone's availability. I want to talk about that half second today. There's nothing wrong with you for having it, and I suspect everyone at that table had a version of the same thought. It is simply one of the most common ways we lose a good evening. And it happens while the evening is still going on. That is the move. The blossom opens, and we reach for the calendar. Something is good, and within seconds, we are trying to arrange for more of it. So, the question underneath today is this. Can we receive something good, without immediately asking it for a promise? But watch what the mind does with happiness. It rarely just takes it. There is the securing move, the one at the table. We should do this more often. We should make this a thing. We should book the same house next year. The instant a moment is good, we start converting it into a plan, because a plan feels like a way of keeping it. There is the documenting move. You lift the phone and take the picture, and the picture is genuinely nice to have later. But notice what happened at the moment of taking it. You stepped out of the scene to preserve the scene, and for those seconds you are the archivist, rather than the guest. There is the auditing move, which is the most exhausting of them. Am I enjoying this properly? Is this as good as it should be? Some part of you stands off to the side with a clipboard, checking whether the experience is meeting the standard, set by the anticipation. You can watch this one work in real time, which makes it useful. Next time your content, ask yourself in words, whether you're happy right now. Something drops away in the asking. The contentment was running perfectly well until it was called in for questioning, and the question turns the participant into an inspector. There are experiences that survive being examined, and there are experiences that are made of not examining them, and a good ordinary evening belongs firmly to the second group. There is the preemptive missing. You're still there, the wine is still on the table, and already you're aware that this will end, that everyone will drive home, that summer is nearly over. You have begun grieving something that is currently happening. And there is the superstitious one, which many of us know well. Things are going too well. Something is coming. You catch yourself scanning the horizon for the bad news that must surely be gathering, because a run of good fortune feels like a dead being accumulated. The same thing happens over longer stretches. There are periods when life is simply going well, when the work is interesting, and the people are healthy, and nothing is on fire, and many of us find these surprisingly hard to inhabit. We keep waiting to be able to relax into it, and the waiting is itself a refusal to relax into it. Some of us only recognize a good period once it is over, which is a peculiar way to run a life and an extremely common one. Each of these takes a moment that was simply arriving and puts it to work. The moment stops being something you are in, and becomes something you are managing. I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to describe all that as a failure of presence, and leave you feeling you have been doing joy incorrectly. That is not what is happening. Every one of those moves comes from love. You want more of this evening, because it is good, and these people matter to you. You take the photograph because you want to keep them. You brace for the bad news, because you have had bad news before, and part of you is trying to make sure it never lands on you unprepared again. Anticipatory grief is what love does when it has already lost something once. All of it is closer to tenderness than to greed. It is affection that has become anxious, which deserves a far gentler hearing than we usually give it. There is also something in the water we all drink. We have been trained to treat experience as investment. A good evening should build towards something. A happy stretch should be evidence that the strategy is working. A lovely afternoon ought to be repeatable, scalable, turned into a tradition. We are fluent in the language of return on investment, and we apply it without noticing, to a Tuesday, in a garden. So when something good arrives, the machinery starts up. What does this mean? How do we get more? What does it prove about how my life is going? And the moment, which was only ever an evening with your friends, is asked to be a promise about the future and a verdict on the past. Children are wonderful to watch on this point because they have not yet learned the trick. The child at the beach is entirely at the beach. There is no proposal that the family should do this more often. No assessment of whether this holiday is living up to last years. No low background awareness that Thursday is coming. There is sand, and there is water, and there is a bucket. And when it is time to go, they're usually devastated. And they mean it completely. And 20 minutes later, they're absorbed in something else. Full arrival, full departure, no negotiation in between. We have traded that for a managed middle. And I am not sure the trade has served us. Here is what it costs. And I think the cost is larger than we admit. The first is simply that you were not there. Not entirely. The evening went on for four hours, and you attended perhaps three and a half of them because the rest was spent in the calendar behind the camera, or scanning the horizon. And that missing half hour is the part you will least be able to recover because the people were right there, and now they have gone home. The second cost is subtler, and it arrives later. When you turn a moment into a promise, you give it something it can fail at. Say you had a wonderful evening in August, and you decided it was the beginning of a new phase. A sign that this group would now be close again that life was turning a corner. Then autumn does what autumn does. Everyone gets busy. The dinner never repeats. And now, in November, that August evening feels a little sad. It has become a broken promise, but nothing broke. The evening happened exactly as it happened, and it was excellent. And none of that has been taken back. It went sour only because we asked it to be a down payment on something, and the balance was never paid. We do this constantly, and it is quite a trick. We take completed good things and retroactively convert them into disappointments, purely by having attached a future to them that they never agreed to carry. Holidays are where I see this most plainly, and where it is almost comic. A week away, and the first two days go to unwinding, and the middle two are genuinely good, and by the fifth day, a countdown has started in the back of the mind. On the last morning, many of us are already home in our heads, doing the mental return journey, mourning a week that still has nine hours left in it. And somewhere in there is the conversation about where we should go next year, which is the same evening at the same table wearing different clothes. And there is a third cost, which is the one I find saddest. The bracing does not work. If you spend a good evening half prepared for the loss of it, you do not suffer less when it ends. You have simply also lost part of the evening. The insurance premium is paid in the currency of the thing you are ensuring, and the policy never pays out. A good moment is not a deposit on anything. It is paid in full on the spot at the time. Nothing further is owed to you, and nothing has been withheld. The evening in the garden was the whole of what the evening in the garden was, and it was complete before anyone stood up to leave. The 29th chapter of the Tao Tiching has a line about this that I keep coming back to, though it is usually read as political advice. Lao Tzu says that the world is a sacred vessel and that it cannot be improved by handling. Whoever grasps at it loses it, whoever holds on to it loses it. Read that as advice about empires, and it is one thing. Read it as advice about a Tuesday evening, and it becomes almost uncomfortably practical, because grasping is precisely what we do. The moment is good, so we close our hand around it, and the closing is what pushes it out. You can test this physically, which is why I like it. Try to pick up water by making a fist. The tighter the fist, the less water you have. An open hand holds a surprising amount. A closed one holds nothing at all, and the harder you squeeze, the drier it gets. That is not a metaphor for how good moments work. It is the same mechanism in a different medium. Attention closed around an experience squeezes the experience out. The second passage comes from a different traditional together, from the Thai forest teacher Ajahn Cha. And it is the most joyful thing I know on this subject. He would hold up a glass and say something like this. Do you see this glass? For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it. I drink out of it. It holds the water admirably, and sometimes it catches the sun. If I knock it off the table and it shatters, I will say, of course. But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious. Sit with the last sentence, because everything is in it. We tend to hear the acceptance of impermanence as a way of protecting ourselves, a kind of emotional insurance, holding things loosely so that losing them will hurt less. That is a bleak reading, and it is not what he is describing. He is saying the opposite. Knowing the glass is already broken is what makes the glass precious. The preciousness comes from the finitude. This evening, in this garden with these particular people, at these particular ages, in this particular summer, will not be repeated. And it is that fact taken fully that makes it worth the whole of your attention right now. You do not enjoy the glass less because it will break. You enjoy it more because you have stopped requiring it to be permanent before you will allow yourself to love it, which brings us back under the cherry trees, because those are the same insight arriving from two different directions. A time-unk holding up a glass and a Japanese poet watching petals land on a picnic blanket are saying one thing. The ending is not the tax you pay on the beautiful thing. The ending is part of what makes it beautiful, and a version of it that lasted forever would be something else entirely, and probably something you would stop noticing by April. That is worth sitting with because it inverts the usual arithmetic. We tend to assume that permanence is the ideal, and that everything short of it is a compromise we tolerate. Both of these traditions are saying calmly that permanence would ruin it. The week is not a lesser version of the month. The week is what makes anybody get on a train and sit under a tree in the cold. So there is appreciating something and there is securing it. They feel similar from the inside and they are opposite in their effects. Appreciating is entirely present tense. It looks like tasting the food, listening to the story, noticing the light, being warm toward the person on your left. It asks nothing of tomorrow. It is also in a plain sense easier. Appreciating requires no work at all beyond staying where you already are, which is why children manage it without instruction, and why it tends to arrive on its own during long walks, in the middle of a piece of music, or on the second glass of wine, when the day has finally let go of you. Securing is future tense, wearing the clothes of appreciation. It looks like planning the repeat, taking the picture, making the toast about how we must do this again, extracting the meaning. It is busy, and it is well meant, and it is always slightly elsewhere. The practical version is almost embarrassingly simple. When you notice the securing move starting, you do not have to fight it or feel bad about it. You just let it finish, and then come back to the table. Say the sentence. We should do this more often is a lovely thing to say out loud, and it makes people feel wanted. Take the photograph if you want the photograph, and then put the phone down and return your attention to the actual room, where the thing you are trying to preserve is still happening for another hour. There is one more move that helps, and it is a change of question. When something good is going on, the mind reaches for, what does this mean? Or how do I keep this? You can substitute a much better one, which is simply, what is here? What is here? The food, the voices, the temperature of the evening, the fact that these people came. That question has no future in it at all, which is why it works. And I want to be clear about what this opens up, because it would be easy to hear all of this as a discipline. One more thing to get right. It is closer to a release. When a moment is allowed to be only itself, you get the whole of it. The colors come back up. You notice the food you are actually eating. You hear the end of the story, rather than half of it. People sometimes worry that holding things loosely will make them care less. My experience is the reverse. What loosens is the grip, and what remains is the affection, which turns out to have been a separate thing all along. There is a version of this you can feel in your own body, and it is worth testing next time you're somewhere good. Notice whether you're leaning slightly forward into the future of the evening, or whether you're actually sitting back in your chair. The forward lean is a securing. Sitting back is nearly the whole practice, and it takes about a second. Somewhere in Japan next spring, several million people will sit down under trees that are already beginning to drop, and they will not spend the afternoon negotiating for a longer season. They will eat, and look up, and let the petals land in their food. There is no reason your Tuesday cannot be held the same way, because it is already enough. It was enough while it was happening, and it stays enough afterwards, and it never once needed tomorrow's permission to have been good. We will be back later in the week with another episode. Until then, take care of yourself, and if something good happens to you in the next few days, however small, try letting it be the whole of what it is. [Music]