Savoring The Moon For Mere Minutes Has Lasted 13 Years

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I was half-reclining on an outdoor chair. I had a small, low table to my right with a mouse pad and mouse. I had a table to my left with a cat who paid keen attention to the scene around us. In front of me, I had my laptop on which I tried to describe to you civil twilight.

It wasn’t easy. How do I explain the play between silhouetted leaves and the dimming orange background? It was a spell on the eyes. It was an otherworldly ratio of softening color to darkness— first 70/30, then 50/50, then as if I’d sunk nearly to the bottom of the sea, 90/10.

This was how day recalculated to night. After that, I was caught in the precarious position of a diurnal in a nocturnal world, so I went inside to my electricity-driven wonderland.

I was in my new “hut”. It’s an old pop-up canopy that we used for our kids’ travel soccer tournaments. Thanks to a story I read about a friend's system for working remotely on occasion in the great outdoors, I designed my own system at the side of my house under the trees with my cat. Welcome to Steph & Kitten’s Hut. Its days are numbered as Winter will set in soon, but whatever time I can get out there is a woodsy boon.

There are lots of reasons to be outside. One, research shows it’s therapeutic in several ways. Two, it’s a break from my office space in an upstairs room, which is nice, but also very much inside. Three, it feels like a mini adventure to work on my laptop under the trees. It’s obvious and natural to think worms, deer, grass, and my HVAC unit belong in the great outdoors. But me?

Yes. Me. And you.

One of the most valuable things about being in some measure of natural surroundings is the opportunity to savor.

Savoring, the mindful appreciation of life experiences — both in the moment or imagining past or future ones — is something I intentionally practiced in a Coursera class a few years back with Dr. Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist. It was called The Science of Well-Being and is taken from Santos’ Yale course of the same name. The idea was to introduce the latest understanding on what contributes to well-being (community) and what doesn’t (loads of money.)

Savoring is a contributor.

It’s what you already know how to do, but the difference between what Dr. Santos knows and what you and I know is that most likely we don’t do it nearly often enough.

Savoring is what we love to do and it’s the easiest thing to do. And it’s the first thing we cut from our schedule to get through the day. And that’s sad because it’s the gate to the gift of being alive. It’s like having a padlock on a door living in our brain which leads to paradise.

It doesn’t take much time to savor. It can be for 5 minutes at a time. That’s almost how long it takes to walk 20 feet down the hall to the bathroom, pee, wash hands, brush teeth, apply face cream, switch the laundry to the dryer, and walk back — I timed it.

Historically, I loved to savor, but as life went on, it became easy to forget to pause to exhale an involuntary moan of spiritual pleasure as I stopped to notice the sunset.

One of my enduring memories of motherhood is the time I spent cuddling with my sons while reading to them. I read to them partly because I figured it would be good for their cognitive and emotional development, but mostly because cuddling together — one on either side of me, all of us squeezed around Cat in the Hat — was sublime. It was every possible pleasure rolled into one muffin of parent-child love. We cuddled. We giggled. We got curious — me in them, them in the book. We bonded. We loved.

That was savoring.

One of my favorite savoring experiences was when I made my first attempt at a hundred-mile run in 2010. It was in the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming. The mountains and hills we traversed were often wide open to the air, lacking the dense tree cover we have here in the eastern U.S. This was a good thing.

Since a hundred miler takes a day or more to do, you’ll be on the trail for a day’s cycle. It was pitch black when I crested a hill and saw it — the entire moon rising over the near horizon. It was the size of half the sky. It was a muted ivory. It was one of the most stunning things I’ve ever seen.

In the throes of a tough endeavor, I could still savor. It would have been hard not to savor that moon, but it also taught me how powerful savoring can be. That single image gives me continued faith that if I ever question whether life here on Earth is a plus or a minus, I know for a fact it’s a plus.

That was savoring.

I’ve savored when there was death’s immanent erasure. I sat in the kitchen with my parents in the final days of my dad’s life. They were playing their last of countless games of gin rummy, to see who would take the final game for all time, whose name would be the winner on the endless listing of tallies in the last of their many score-keeping notebooks.

It was sad, to be sure, but it was beautiful in the way they went about it. I admired them as I watched. I savored the moment because it was so rich in emotion and revelation that it was impossible to look away.

This, too, was savoring.

In Steph & Kitten’s Hut, I tried to write to you about the twilight. I wanted you to know how two owls in the distance started to hoot as the sunset was ending and night would officially arrive. They hooted to each other in what seemed like casual conversation, but I don’t speak Owl.

Then, as all light was nearly extinguished, a Barred Owl let loose a booming gravelly hoot from a tree not twenty feet from me. My heart jumped and my capillaries flushed. The sound was an ambush foghorn in an ocean I had no idea I was in. It was thrilling.

Every milli-piece of me was rapt in the hope of another howl. My every attention was on the silence left by this sudden sound and on the potential for a repeat performance. And it came, and then again. I was enveloped in awe, taken by this owl. It was the coolest thing.

This was savoring, and I wanted to describe it to you in just the right words so that maybe you’d know, too. I’m not sure I did, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ll one day go out to hear the owls or see the moon at a time when you think you simply don’t have five minutes to spare — all because I promised you one hundred percent that you do.

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Hope you're well, friends.