Savoring the Moment

In college I had a good friend named Arun who would suck down Frappuccinos like they were water. Not the milkshake-type things you actually get at Starbucks, but the chocolatey/coffeey/milky drink in the little glass bottles that you get at the convenience store. Many a night during freshman year, he would buy one at the 7-11 on the first floor of our dorm, pop it open, and down it in like three long gulps, 30 seconds total. I didn't understand it. Whenever I got one, I would gingerly sip it and try to make it last as long as possible -- it was a treat, and I wanted to enjoy it. I used to yell at him whenever he'd drink one, chiding him for not "savoring" it. How can you even taste something, let alone enjoy it, when you consume it that fast?

The way I've been living my life over the past few months has been like the way Arun drank Frappuccinos. I've just been running down to the 7-11 to get one, sucking it down, and moving on to the next thing so quickly that I don't even realize what I've just done, I don't even know what it tasted like. Get up, get ready for work, go to work, multitask all day and eat lunch at my desk, come home, make dinner, rush to some social activity, rush home, go to bed. It's not that I don't enjoy the social activities, and it's not that I don't at least occasionally enjoy work -- it's just the fact that my mind is going so many miles an hour while I'm doing all of these things that I'm not really, truly appreciating the fact that I am doing any of them.

At the risk of dragging the metaphor on too far, I want to savor my Frappuccinos; I want to be able to tell the difference between Mocha and Vanilla. I want to enjoy the things I'm doing and the company of the people I'm doing them with, to decide intentionally how to spend my time and then intentionally savor that time. I want to focus on what I'm doing, when I'm doing it, and give it the attention it deserves. The hardest part is just letting myself slow down enough to enjoy any given moment -- to put aside thoughts and worries about what else is going on, what I have to do next, what I have to do in a week, so that I can focus on whatever I'm doing right then.


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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." -Matthew 6:34