3
“I Don’t Have Time for This”
The next morning, I was in the bathroom, scrolling through my emails, enjoying what I thought might be my last visit for a while to a non-rest-stop throne, when my phone rang. The caller ID said “Elvis Duran.”
“Morning,” I said, somewhat formally, not knowing who exactly was going to be on the other end of the line.
“You’re on the radio. We’re talking about you.” It was Elvis himself, the host of the number one Top 40 morning radio show in America, his unmistakable deep voice resonating through the speaker on my phone and simultaneously out to millions of listeners—all as I sat there helplessly indisposed.
Shit.
I mean, not literally, but…shit.
I’d first met Elvis three years earlier, shortly after my first book came out. One day my Twitter feed was suddenly clogged with people telling me that someone named Elvis Duran had talked about 10% Happier on his radio show. I noticed my sales rank on Amazon—which (and I’m not proud of this) I had gotten in the habit of checking compulsively—go through the roof. I told Bianca about this, mentioning that I had never heard of the guy, and she looked at me like I was crazy. “Are you kidding?” she said. “I love Elvis Duran. I’ve been listening to him since I was a kid.”
A few weeks later, I went on his show. It was one of the only interviews I have ever done where Bianca insisted on joining. I was immediately impressed by Elvis. He was a stocky fiftysomething with salt-and-pepper hair—and very clearly not your usual morning shock jock. He is openly gay, and the two most prominent figures in his large crew of on-air personalities are women. The team members are nice to one another, as well as to the guests. And they do all this while still managing to be very, very funny.
I was so taken with Elvis that I decided to do a Nightline profile on him, during which I came to like him even more. I learned that while professionally he rubs elbows with people like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber, he is more comfortable hanging out at home on the couch with his longtime boyfriend, Alex, a zookeeper from Staten Island. In part it’s because he’s shy. “I’m not a glamorous person at all,” he told me. “I just don’t fit in.” But it was also because, at the time, he was deeply insecure about his weight. In fact, during our interview, he revealed that he planned to have a kind of bariatric procedure known as the gastric sleeve, where they take out 85 percent of your stomach. “I haven’t seen my penis,” he said, peering down over his paunch, laughing. “Can you see my penis and describe it to me?”
As surprised as I was by the early morning, in-the-bathroom phone call, I was also—pun not intended—relieved. I had been worrying about something related to Elvis.
A few weeks earlier, I had asked his team whether it would be okay if my crew came to his TriBeCa studio to shoot behind the scenes on day two of our meditation tour, because I thought that, like GMA, it would be a chaotic, counterintuitive environment in which to talk about the practice. However, I did not want Elvis to feel obliged to put me on the air.
And yet here I was, on the air. “Why can’t you be interviewed?” asked Elvis. “What’s your deal? When are you coming in?”
Say no more. Now I was all in. “Put me on the radio,” I said. “I’ll talk as much as you want!”
I showered and grabbed the new winter coat my wife had bought me for the trip. Bianca and Alexander came out of the bedroom to send me off. A kiss for Bianca, a groggy snuggle with Alexander, and then I hopped in a cab and headed downtown.
I got off the elevator at Elvis’s studio and walked into the spacious reception area. The 10% Happier team—including Jeff, Ben Rubin, the CEO of the 10% Happier app, and the camera crew—was already assembled on the other side of the room. As I began heading in their direction, though, someone grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me right into the studio. I was whisked to a seat with a microphone and handed a headset. “Dan Harris from ABC News,” intoned Elvis, “why are you here on our show?”
“Because you guys are out of your minds,” I said, still a little dazed, but trying to be at least somewhat witty. “Every morning I listen to the show, it’s a cry for help.”
Elvis was barely recognizable after his surgery. He’d always been a handsome fellow, but now, at nearly half his old weight, he looked transformed. He was seated, wearing a black hoodie, at his normal perch in the center of a large U-shaped table, a metallic arm dangling a golden mic in front of his face. He was surrounded by three male producers, who were constantly handing him notes—prompts for jokes, information about callers, texts and tweets from some of the seven million listeners who were reacting to the show in real time. In front of him, seated at a rectangular table, were his two female co-hosts.
Elvis steered the conversation to meditation, mentioning that he had recently resumed his practice, which he often did in the early morning before work with his dog, Max, in his lap.
“I’m finding in my life that I am seeing a change,” he said. “I used to get mad and throw chairs.”
“You’ve actually thrown chairs?” I asked, genuinely surprised.
“I used to break chairs,” he assured me.
It’s easy to forget that, despite his relaxed on-air persona, Elvis runs a complex operation: a show syndicated in eighty markets, with a large staff consisting of lively personalities. Now that he was meditating again, he said, “I do stop and think things through a little more. I am more mindful about people around me and what they’re saying. I try to be fair, and I try to be the peacekeeper when I can.
“I’m still moody,” he allowed. “I’m still an awful bitch.”
After some more chatter, he opened up for callers. This would be our first chance on the road trip to hear from the masses. The very first question was both extremely important and entirely unsurprising.
“Does it need to be a ten-minute session, a fifteen-minute session?” asked Brian, a high school health teacher. “How long does it take?”
This is almost always the first question I get when I speak to people about meditation. Once they grasp the benefits of the practice and realize that it doesn’t require clearing the mind, the next big problem is: How the hell do I fit this into my schedule?
When it comes to finding time to meditate, I have good news—and even better news. The good news is that meditation does not need to take up much of your time. “I think it’s great to start with five to ten minutes a day,” I told Brian. The general consensus among teachers and scientists seems to be that if you do five to ten minutes every day, you should be able to derive many of the benefits.
And here’s the better news: if five minutes seem like too much for you, one minute also counts. In fact, not only does one minute count, it can be extremely powerful. Getting “on the cushion,” to use a meditative term of art, is the hardest part of the habit formation process, and the proposition of a single minute is uniquely unintimidating and scalable. So if the easiest way for you to establish a daily habit is to start with one minute, then go for it. My view—and that of my team—is that, especially at the beginning, consistency is more important than duration.
“The goal is to engineer a daily collision with the a-hole in your head,” I explained to Brian. “And then when that a-hole gives you bad ideas, you’re better able to resist him.”
This one-minute-counts tack is a new one for me. For years I had been somewhat stridently recommending that people start with five to ten minutes a day. My usual argument was: I don’t care if you have seventeen jobs and twenty-five kids, you’ve got five to ten minutes a day. How much time do you spend watching TV? Checking social media? Is it more than five minutes? Well, then, you definitely have time to meditate. I loved to quote the Harvard physician Dr. Sanjiv Chopra: “Everyone should meditate once a day. And if you don’t have time to meditate, then you should do it twice a day.”
I have come to see, however, that this approach is a bit out of touch. To be clear, I really do believe—and Jeff is with me on this—that five to ten minutes a day of meditation is a reasonable and achievable goal. The fact is, the more you do, the more you’ll get out of it. (Within reason, of course; no one’s arguing you should do it twelve hours a day. Unless you want to go really big and attend a meditation retreat.) Even though I maintain that it’s mathematically hard to defend the notion that you don’t have the time, I’ve had to acknowledge that in our overtaxed, overscheduled, overstimulated era, the perception of time starvation is very real. I’ve also learned, through my work with the app company, how difficult the process of establishing a new habit can be.
What follows are nine super-practical pro tips, grounded in scientific research around habit formation as well as the messy reality of daily life. You don’t have to do all of these, of course. Just try the ones that seem promising to you. The most important thing to know about behavior change is that there are no silver bullets. The best way to approach it is with a spirit of experimentation. Try things out and then be willing to fail and get back on the horse.
PRO TIP: Grit Won’t Do the Trick—You Need Rewards
One thing we know from the science is that willpower alone will not get you over the hump. Willpower is an unreliable inner resource that tends to evaporate quickly, especially when you get hungry, angry, lonely, or tired (four classic discipline-killing conditions, often combined in the acronym HALT). A better strategy is to tap into the benefits. Humans are motivated by rewards. Best to co-opt the pleasure centers of the brain if you want to create a sustainable habit.
This became abundantly clear when Jeff and I pulled aside Bethany Watson, one of Elvis’s co-hosts, for an interview. We set up our cameras to chat with Bethany, a thirtysomething aspiring actress, in a corner of the reception area outside the studio. I had always been struck by how intelligent, open, and likable Bethany is. As I learned in our chat, though, beneath her easy laugh and fashionable exterior lurks something darker. “I have an anxiety disorder,” she told us. “I’m constantly anxious.”
Her baseline anxiety, she said, is only exacerbated by her job, which is thrilling but stressful. “You’re on all the time,” she said. There can be no radio silence; you always need to have something clever to add to the conversation; and everyone’s worried about whether the boss is in a bad mood. It was a little like being on GMA, only more hectic. No teleprompter, no net.
And then there are all those text messages from listeners, which can get nasty. “At every moment, you have constant judgments on your person, basically?” asked Jeff.
“Yeah,” said Bethany.
“It’s not just the voice in your own head—” I began.
“It’s the voice in everyone else’s head,” said Jeff, jumping in. We were already completing each other’s sentences. “That’s…intense. It’s like being inside a single neurotic brain.”
“Yeah, it is,” Bethany said.
But when we asked her why she doesn’t meditate, she threw the “time” card. “It’s just that I am so busy every single day,” she said, pointing out that she did the Elvis show for four hours a morning and then went straight into a full day of acting classes. “So then when you come home and you’re exhausted, where do you find the time to sit for even five minutes?”
When we pressed her, though, she made an interesting admission: “I think the real reason I’m not doing it is because I haven’t fully committed to making it a priority.” This is not uncommon. Sometimes when people say they don’t have time to meditate, they’re actually pointing to a whole panoply of unspoken reservations, some of them quite profound.
This is where reward comes in.
Initially, Jeff tried to sell the reward thusly: “Ultimately, meditation’s about enjoying your beingness.” To which Bethany nodded politely and uncomprehendingly. Her expression kind of reminded me of when my son tries to share his toys with our cats, or that time when I jokingly offered Bianca a tramp stamp for her fortieth birthday.
Soon enough, however, we got to an extremely clear and compelling potential benefit for Bethany, one that was staring her directly in the face: relief from anxiety. She simply needed to make a more solid connection between meditation and said relief. For example, she knew—and her therapist agreed—that when she exercised, her anxiety was mitigated. “We notice a change in my anxiety levels when I haven’t worked out for a while, so I have to make that time.” That’s what it would have to be with meditation, she acknowledged.
Bingo. I knew there was a decent probability this could work for Bethany, because it had worked for me. Fending off anxiety and depression has been a huge part of what drives me to keep both exercising and meditating. When I am covering a breaking news story and don’t have as much time to meditate, I notice that the voice in my head gets louder, more obnoxious, and harder to ignore. “That’s my motivator,” I told Bethany.
However, humans often need more superficial motivators to help us overcome inertia and indiscipline. Bethany led us in a brainstorming session on features we could build into the app that might help people get started.
“If there was some sort of present at the end,” she mused—specifically, she was thinking of a discount card to Nordstrom. “It might have to be that shallow initially.”
“No, that’s great,” I said. “I would do it for cookies, for example.”
“Or maybe there’s some negative incentive,” said Jeff. “Twenty dollars would be taken out of your bank account and given to your worst enemy if you don’t do it. Punishment systems.”
I could see Ben, my hard-nosed, financially prudent young CEO, squirming nervously a few feet out of camera range as we tossed out these deeply impractical ideas.
More seriously, Bethany offered: “I need a visual representation of how far I’ve come.” Like a progress line that shows up on your phone, she said—or starbursts that fill your screen if you complete a certain amount of days. This seemed to calm Ben down.
After we wrapped the interview, Bethany headed off to the bathroom. Minutes later she came rushing back to us with the coup de grâce.
“Okay, I have an idea,” she said. “What if there was a kitten that I had to keep alive by meditating every day?”
“On the app?” I asked.
“On the app. Like, a little kitten, and every time you meditated, he got a little stronger, and then if you didn’t meditate, he withered. That would keep me meditating. The cartoon little paws.”
“The adorable big eyes,” I added.
“I want a white one with two different-colored eyes.”
I turned to Ben, who was now doing full-body contortions. “Do we have the technology to build that, Ben?”
“Too much right now,” he said, chuckling and holding his hand up as if to physically repel the idea. “We’ll look at it.”
“If this happens, we’ll be giving you stock in the company,” I assured Bethany as she walked back into the studio.
“Namaste,” she said, pressing her hands together and giving a bow. The kind I like, with irony.
PRO TIP: Think Strategically About Your Schedule
Next up at Elvis’s studio, we sat down with Danielle Monaro, a married mother of two with a chewy Bronx accent, tart attitude, and infectious giggle.
Wearing blue jeans and a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the word “LOVE,” she told us that, when it came to meditation, she was also simply too busy. “I’m in mommy mode, you know. I don’t have time to breathe half the time. You want me to sit down and meditate?”
That wasn’t to say she couldn’t use it, she conceded. “I feel like I have a lot of anxiety, where I worry about stupid stuff that doesn’t matter. I’ll honestly be laying there in the bed, and I’ll go, ‘Gosh, that fan sounds really, really loud. I hope it doesn’t fly off the ceiling.’ ” Not everything that causes Danielle to wring her hands is irrational, of course. “Being a parent, you constantly worry,” she said.
I get it. As a parent myself, I understand the sort of nameless unreasoning that can overtake you when, say, your kid is five minutes late coming home, or when you find a swollen lymph node. As Danielle told us, what causes the most anxiety is the stuff you “have no control over.”
Jeff assured her that letting go of things you cannot control is one of the biggest benefits of the practice. “You get more laissez-faire. You become more like an old lady, a wise old lady.”
“Elvis doesn’t want us to be old ladies,” Danielle said as we all started laughing. “I could be old on the inside.”
“Inside, yeah,” said Jeff. “Cool grandma.”
“Okay, that’s cool. I’ll be the cool grandma.”
But how to get her to actually do it? Our approach with Danielle—and this is something we recommend to anyone who’s struggling with the time issue—was to ask her to step back and take a look at her overall schedule. There were almost certainly points in the day where she could spare a few minutes, and where meditation would slot in nicely.
“I was just thinking as I listened to your schedule,” I said to Danielle, “that the best time might be right before you go to bed.” She agreed. Jeff promised to make her a short bespoke meditation that could be used anytime she had a free moment, including the moment before bed.
“I hope it works,” she said, “because that stupid ceiling fan is driving me nuts.”
As you think about your own schedule, bear in mind that some people find that having a set time every day—right before bed, first thing in the morning, just after a workout—really helps establish a habit. Scientists who study habit formation talk about “cue, routine, reward.” You can experiment with constructing a cue-routine-reward loop that gets you to meditate. For example, “After I park my car [cue], I will meditate for five minutes [routine], and I’ll feel a little calmer and more mindful [reward].” Repeat this loop to ingrain the habit. You can even put it in your calendar, which some people find is a great way to cement the whole thing. That said, if, like me, you have an unpredictable schedule, it is absolutely fine to simply fit it in whenever and wherever you can.
PRO TIP: Give Yourself Permission to Fail
It is impossible to overstate the importance of giving yourself the freedom to experiment, fail, and try again. Remember that we are wired to fail. Evolution has bequeathed us a brain that optimizes for survival and reproduction, not long-term health planning. If you get all overheated about whatever tactic you choose first and put too much pressure on yourself to make it work, you will deplete your resiliency. It’s helpful to approach habit formation with the same attitude we hope to employ during meditation: every time you get lost, just begin again.
Before we left, Elvis brought Jeff and me back on the air for a quick goodbye.
“By the way,” Elvis said, “people were wondering, is this an infomercial? We’ve given you a lot of free plugs here. I think some cash under the table is perfect.”
When we emerged from the building, I saw it for the first time. It was huge and orange, and it would be our home for the next week and a half: our bus.
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “I love it.”
It had huge signs on each side that read “The 10% Happier Meditation Tour.” On the back, a smaller sign said, “We may never arrive!” Passersby were taking pictures.
I climbed aboard and beheld the interior. There were five main compartments. First, the driver’s area, occupied by Eddie Norton, a shy, mountainous man who took his job very seriously, which I found reassuring. After Eddie’s lair, a living space with ample seating and a tricked-out satellite TV and stereo system. Next there was a mini kitchen and full bathroom. Then came the bunks, twelve of them, arranged in two rows of three on each side of the bus. They looked a little coffin-like, but I briefly lay down in the top bunk that had been assigned to me, and it was surprisingly comfy. (Not that I would have wanted to see it under a black light.) At the far rear, there was another sitting area, which the legendary George Clinton had apparently used as a bedroom suite when on the road with Parliament Funkadelic. No coffin-beds for George.
As I looked around at the preposterous bus and at all of my smiling traveling companions, I was starting to feel a little giddy. Jeff wisely brought us all down to earth with a reminder of the stakes. “Last night, doing that podcast with Josh Groban, and suddenly realizing that a hundred thousand people might be actually finding their way to a practice that might help them, that was a hugely moving experience.”
I have met very few people who get more of a high out of service than Jeff. He learned this in part from his parents, who have dedicated much of their spare time to local charities. But it’s also just in his character. Some professed altruists annoy me because I cynically suspect they don’t actually mean it. In Jeff’s case, though, it was clear to me that being useful was like oxygen—especially when it came to engaging one-on-one with meditation students. As he likes to say, “There are no existential crises in those moments.”
Back on the bus, I added, “This is fun and goofy, and I love it. I’m obviously P. T. Barnum–esque. But what we’re doing matters. If you could actually boost people’s level of sanity by ten percent, that’s a massive value-add.”
Fittingly perhaps, our next stop was a place where I had once been utterly insane—at least, according to my mother.
Several hours after leaving New York City, the bus rolled into suburban Boston and pulled up at Newton South High School, my alma mater, where I could easily have been voted Least Likely to Do Anything Mindful, Ever. Here we were twenty-six years later, and hundreds of people had shown up to listen to me and Jeff speak about meditation.
Before the talk, Jeff and I chatted with my parents backstage. They were both in their early seventies but still deeply engaged in their medical careers.
“Did you guys see the plaque that they put up for my academic excellence here?” I asked them.
“No. Are you kidding me?” asked my mother incredulously.
I was definitely kidding. Suffice it to say I had been neither athlete nor mathlete.
“You were getting D’s in math,” my mother reminded me.
My dad chimed in, clearly enjoying exposing my miscreant past in front of Jeff and all the cameras. “The irony was, years later, he asked us why didn’t we make him study more!”
Now they were really working themselves up into a lather. “One day he said to me, ‘Why didn’t you guys make me work harder in high school?’ ” related my mother, grabbing her head in mock exasperation, as everyone laughed. “We were trying to keep you out of jail!”
She was only partly exaggerating. During my high school years, I was a prodigious pot smoker and dedicated class cutter. I also had a robust career spray-painting graffiti onto the walls that lined the local subway tracks.
My mom says she endured a years-long stretch during which she never once saw me smile. “You were so angry,” she said.
Too bad she didn’t have a meditation practice back when she clearly could have used it. She does have one now, though—because her son, the former delinquent, introduced her to it. She does fifteen minutes a day, often with her cat, Harry, by her side. She told us it gives her “the ability to step back and see what’s going on instead of just reacting to it. I always had a pretty short fuse.”
I don’t recall her having a short fuse. What I remember most is her making elaborate, DIY Halloween costumes for my brother and me, and also insisting that we not watch TV. (For which I believe I have exacted ample revenge by way of my current career.) True, my mother has an intimidating, suffer-no-fools intelligence, but she is by no means as prone to anger as her father, Robert Johnson.
“I’m not as bad as he was,” she said, “but I have a tendency to take things personally, worry about what other people are thinking, worry and worry and worry about if I’m doing well enough, if I’m working hard enough, how far behind I am. The usual obsessive, type-A personality stuff.”
While my mother had found the practice useful, my father was not meditating.
“He says he doesn’t need to,” said my mom, chuckling. “He’s got perfect equanimity.”
“I find napping is an equivalent,” said my dad impishly.
Jeff and I took the stage in the auditorium, which was set with an oriental rug and a pair of large potted plants. It looked like an episode of Between Two Ferns. In the audience, I spotted a few of my high school classmates, buddies from a group of friends my parents had facetiously referred to as the “Brain Trust.” They, too, had managed to stay out of jail.
I held forth for a while about the benefits of mindfulness. Jeff led us in a brief meditation. Then we opened the floor up for questions. Very quickly we got to the issue of time. A sharp young professional named Chris approached the mic, admitting that he was mildly nervous about doing so.
“I hope I don’t have a panic attack right now,” said Chris.
“You haven’t been doing any cocaine, have you?” I asked.
No, he assured me. And then: “I’d like to ask you about time management,” he said. He had started meditating as an undergrad and had been sitting five times a week for about twenty minutes. Now, though, he was working at a competitive financial firm and finding that he was only sitting twice a week. How could he find more time to do it?
PRO TIP: One Minute Counts
“You should start thinking about short meditations,” I told Chris. “I think one minute counts.”
As discussed, if you only have the time or the motivation for a sixty-second sit, you should chalk it up as a win. One of the trickiest parts of habit formation is getting the new behavior anchored into your life. Once that is done, you can tinker with the amount of time you sit.
What’s more, after one minute of meditation, people often think to themselves: I’m already here; might as well keep going a bit. As the meditation teacher Cory Muscara argues, this is a key moment, because you’re moving from “extrinsic” motivation (that is, meditating because you feel like you have to) to the much more powerful “intrinsic” motivation (that is, meditating because you want to). The second you opt in for more meditation, you’re doing it out of actual interest, which makes it much more likely to have a lasting effect.
So if you’re struggling to find time to meditate, look for opportunities for this kind of quickie. After you brush your teeth, after your morning coffee, after you park your car at work, after you sit down on the train, after you put your head down on the pillow…You get the picture.
As Jeff argues, one minute counts because it only takes one second to disembed from a difficult emotion or thought pattern. Here he is with a one-minute meditation you can use anywhere, anytime.
This is a busy person’s meditation. Ten breaths. That’s it. A modest one-minute reset intended to take some of the wind out of the sails of whatever story line you’ve been racing around in. The idea is simple: wherever you are, in any situation or mental state, count ten long, slow breaths.
So the thing my mom told me to do when I was a tantruming kid is actually a meditation?
The only difference is we’re adding some adult curiosity about the process, in particular the process of shifting our attention from our mental preoccupations to our breath. We’re going to see if we can deliberately let our stories fade out—like the story, say, that some of us tell about not having time to meditate, or the more general “I’m so busy” freneticism inside which a great many of us live. We’ll try to let the thoughts fade even as the feeling of the breath gets richer and more real.
TEN GOOD BREATHS
1 minute or longer
Start by stopping, wherever you are: lying in your bedroom, parked in your car, standing in an elevator. Try it with your eyes open, but keep your gaze soft (it’s the perfect stealth meditation). In this meditation, we’re intentionally controlling the first few breaths, breathing more deeply than normal, exaggerating the airflow to help us feel it more.
Big inhale: “One.” Counting breaths helps us pay attention. Make the out-breath nice and long. See if you can let it be a release, your whole body softening as the diaphragm relaxes. For the next few in-breaths, experiment with holding in the air for a moment. As you breathe out, imagine you are breathing out whatever worry or concern may have been spinning around in your head. After three or four breaths like this, move into breathing normally.
As you count each breath, get interested in how fully you can feel the sensation of breathing, its softness and rhythm. Really try to get into it as you stand there in the elevator staring into space, grooving on your breath. Notice how you’re able to shift the ratio of your attention, so that your thoughts get less loud and insistent as your breath gets more pronounced. Notice how as we focus in, the visual world kind of washes out. Keep counting—you can make it to ten. If you get distracted and forget where you were, start over from where you got lost, always with a sense of humor. How patient can you be with each breath? No rush, breathing like you have all the time in the world. See if you can enjoy the simplicity of the activity as everything else fades into the background.
When you get to ten, notice any feelings of settledness and calm that may be there. Tune back in to your surroundings. Welcome back. You can come here anytime.
Now: leave the elevator.
CHEAT SHEET
1. Stop, wherever you are. Bring your attention to breathing. Count “one” as you inhale. Imagine breathing out any tension as you exhale. Count “two” on the next inhale.
2. See if you can make it to ten without losing your focus. Explore how fully you can feel each breath, letting the world around you fade out a bit.
3. If you get distracted and forget where you are, start over from where you got lost, always with a sense of humor about your tragic gnat-like attention span.
PRO TIP: Free-Range Meditations
The other piece of advice we gave to Chris, the young businessman who spoke up at the Newton South event, was that if you can’t find time to do formal meditation, you can co-opt your everyday life activities—walking between meetings, brushing your teeth, doing dishes—and turn them into mini meditations.
Jeff has some advice about how to transform your daily activities into what I like to call “free-range meditation.”
So the classic meditation visual is eyes closed, legs crossed, ass planted on a cushion or chair in a quiet room. And that’s fine. The cushion is the lab. Or, if you prefer, the gym. It’s where you train and experiment in a relatively simple and distraction-free environment. But most people don’t pump iron in the gym so they can feel good pumping iron in the gym. The idea is to bring your healthy body into your life. Well, the same is true of meditation and the mind. For this reason, some teachers and traditions deliberately emphasize meditation techniques meant to be practiced in the world.
That’s what this little section is about. And the good news is, you can pretty much meditate on anything: sounds, sights, tastes, touches, feelings—any sensation. That’s because it’s less about the meditation “object” and more about the qualities of attention—like, for example, concentration and equanimity—that you bring to that object. These qualities are like muscle groups of the mind. They can be trained.
The training of specific mental qualities is an important idea, one we’ll continue to develop as we proceed through the book. We’ve actually already spoken quite a bit about the training of concentration. The following meditations tap the same concentration muscle, but they also emphasize the curiosity muscle, which ultimately leads to more clarity about what’s going on in our experience. Clarity is like dialing up the resolution knob on an old-fashioned TV set. Here are some simple examples.
FREE-RANGE MEDITATIONS
WALKING THROUGH SOUND
10 seconds or longer
We have a full walking meditation in Chapter 8, which focuses on the physicality of walking. This is a meditation that focuses on the auditory aspect of walking. I do it all the time, because apparently I’m a weirdo. The next time you’re walking anywhere—inside or out—notice sounds. Part of your attention, of course, is on making sure you don’t get run over by a bike courier, but part of it is on the full ambient soundscape: the rise and fall of voices, the distant hum of traffic, the summertime buzz of cicadas. You are deliberately shifting attention away from the inner world of thoughts and feelings to the outer world of sound. Try not to get too caught up in identifying what’s making the sounds. You don’t need to know what you are hearing, only that you are hearing. How weird! Hearing is happening. You are living in ear-world. Round sounds, sharp sounds, crisp sounds: warblewarbleWHOOT
SHOWER
10 seconds or longer
Shift your attention to the sensation of the warm water flowing over your body. Can you experience the water as a massage? Zoom in on the little pressure changes, on the individual streams against your skin. Stay with exactly what’s happening; try not to get lost in a daydream. Now, this is already a good enough meditation—quite lush and sensual, to say nothing of wet. But I like to add an extra something to test my openness. I’ll start by noticing the receptivity of my body to the warm water—pores open, body relaxed. And then I’ll switch the water to cold, and see if I can maintain the same open attitude. Not bracing or rigid, but letting the cold flow into and through me. As with cold water, so with life. How long can you keep your composure?
Okay, I need to pop in and comment here that this is a seriously strange and masochistic meditation.
It’s equanimity training. Helpful for managing discomfort of all kinds. Zen monks do it under ice-cold waterfalls while a single Japanese flute plays in the distance.
TOOTH-BRUSHING
10 seconds or longer
Who the heck pays attention to brushing their teeth? Normally we’re on automatic pilot as we do this, grinding down our gums as we mentally rehearse our day. In this sense, tooth brushing is terra incognita. See if you can slow the whole activity right down: squeezing the toothpaste, first contact, the rhythmic flexion of the bristles on your teeth. How much detail can you feel? How into it can you get? Can you brush your teeth like Jimi Hendrix played guitar: eyes closed, hips flung forward, blotter of acid under your terry-cloth headband?
A BUNCH MORE
Meditation is basically the end of boredom. Standing in line at the ATM? Meditate on the feeling of your feet on the ground. Sitting on a bus? Soften your gaze and meditate on the flowing movement of color and form. Bored out of your mind at a dinner party? Meditate on the sound of clinking silverware or the taste of the food—chewing slowly, eyes closed, in a way that is guaranteed to disturb the other guests. Having sex? Meditate on the feeling of stunned gratitude and incredulity.
The possibilities are endless. As you go about your day, look for opportunities to shift the ratio of your attention from thinking and planning to hearing and seeing and touching. If you get distracted, get curious about the experience of realizing you’ve been distracted. This mini realization is a literal rehearsal for bigger realizations that can happen down the line in meditation. Wake-ups are all the same; only the size of them is different. And like I’ve said, it is so important to take a moment to feel satisfaction when you wake up. With mindfulness we are training our ability to choose how we want to pay attention. Each wake-up is a new moment of choice. Many teachers argue it is the only place real choice ever happens.
Last thing: while free-range meditation can be fun and useful—the whole point of having a meditation practice, after all, is to have mindfulness metastasize throughout your whole life—it’s easier to make mindfulness-in-daily-life exercises work if you have a base of formal, seated practice, in which you are doing nothing but training your capacity to stay present to what’s happening.
PRO TIP: Adopt an Attitude of “Daily-ish”
A woman in the balcony at the Newton South event chimed in with a concept I’d never heard before. She said her meditation teacher told students that they should aim to be meditating “daily-ish.”
“We might have to steal that,” I said. I always worry that if you’re overly rigid about dailiness, it can backfire. It sets up a situation where, if you miss a day or two, the voice in your head—that slippery little storyteller—can weasel in and whisper, “You’re a failed meditator.” Then boom: you’re done.
“Daily-ish actually has enough elasticity, I think, to lead to an abiding habit,” I said to my new friend in the cheap seats. “Thank you, appreciate it.”
Elasticity is a key concept from behavior change research. Scientists call it “psychological flexibility.” A related example that Jeff uses, when it comes to his diet, is the “80/20 rule”: 80 percent of the time he eats healthy food, and the rest of the time he eats whatever he wants. This way, he rarely feels deprived. It’s like a steam-release valve. I liked this concept so much I instituted my own version: the 60/40 rule.
PRO TIP: The Accordion Principle
Another way to inject a dose of elasticity into your practice is something I call the “Accordion Principle.” It’s a combo of “One Minute Counts” and “Adopt an Attitude of ‘Daily-ish.’ ”
If your goal is to do five to ten minutes a day of meditation, one way to give yourself a break on really busy days is to do just one minute. It’s another hack that allows you to keep your foot in the game and prevent the turkey in your head from offering up pseudo-wisdom along the lines of “You fell off the wagon, you’re a hopeless case. Give up now before you embarrass yourself further.”
PRO TIP: Make Yourself Accountable to Other People
Behavior change scientists tell us that while some people will not institute a healthy habit on their own, they will do it when other people are holding them accountable.
One way to create that kind of accountability is to join a community of some sort. This is a huge emphasis for Jeff, who helped start a meditation group in Toronto. As he told the crowd at Newton South, “It can be as simple as this: just get a few of your friends together and start.”
Another option is to join a regular sitting group at your local meditation center, assuming you have one in your area. “It’s like going to yoga or the gym,” said Jeff. “Now you’re there; you gotta do it.”
Joining a community confers benefits that go well beyond accountability. In my experience, hanging out with other meditators sets up a kind of HOV-lane effect. Being around people who take the meditative principles seriously and are endeavoring to apply these concepts in their own lives can create positive peer pressure. Or, as Jeff says, “it sort of normalizes the whole weird thing.”
Speaking personally, while I always enjoy sitting in groups, my unpredictable schedule makes it hard to create a reliable accountability structure. What’s more, I’ve never been much of a joiner. However, I have found that it’s enormously valuable to have friends who are interested in meditation. These friendships can run deeper, in part because regular meditators—people who make it a practice to step out of their automatic routines and who are no longer operating from behind such a thick filter of egoic thoughts—have more room to connect with others.
There’s a great story about the Buddha’s right-hand man, Ananda. One day Ananda was hanging out with some friends, talking about practice. Invigorated, he returned to the Buddha and declared that having friends like these was “half the holy life.” The Buddha quickly corrected him, saying, “It’s the whole of the holy life.” (For the record, I don’t think these guys were using “holy” in a metaphysical sense. You could probably just replace it with the word “good.”)
Finally, if, like me, you are not a joiner, there is another powerful way to establish accountability: create a relationship with a meditation teacher. Personally, I am lucky enough to have a long-standing relationship with an extraordinary teacher named Joseph Goldstein, who knows my mind well and has managed to keep me on track, even though I’m an attentionally challenged hedonist with trouble sitting still. If you want to find a teacher, I recommend you sample a class at your local meditation center and see if it’s a good fit. You can also check online for a teacher who is willing to connect via video chat.
My favorite moment of our visit to Newton came about midway through the event when a woman named Carla, a mom with moxie, came to the mic and let me have it.
Carla was aware of a fact that I have not yet revealed to you, gentle reader, for fear that you might conclude that I am—how shall I say this?—fucking bonkers: I meditate for two hours a day.
Allow me to explain. I made the decision to dramatically increase my daily dosage of sitting after having meditated for several years, and after having written a whole book about it. I did it primarily because I’d had the privilege of hanging around with many people who are long-term, dedicated meditators and seeing how cool and seemingly happy many of them are. This made me deeply interested—both personally and journalistically—in what lies beyond 10% Happier. (In case you’re curious, Jeff does about thirty-five minutes of formal sitting practice on most days, but it’s worth noting that he’s been at this significantly longer than I have, has spent way more time on retreat, and is, frankly, a bit maniacal about peppering his days with all kinds of mindfulness-in-action practices.)
Carla, who’d heard me discuss my two-hour-a-day habit on my podcast, simply could not fathom how, as a fellow parent and busy professional, I managed to squeeze in this volume of meditation every day.
“The biggest obstacle for me,” she said, “is I have two young kids and they have this, like, radar. I crawl out of bed so quietly in the morning. I just shuffle one foot over to my cushion. And they sense it—and they’re there!” She had a great comic delivery, and the crowd was laughing along.
Then she turned on me. “I think a lot about your wife. I’ve never met her, but I’ve heard you talk about how long you meditate each day, and I’m like, ‘Wow, she puts up with that?’ ” Now she really had the crowd. Jeff was beaming with glee and bowing in Carla’s direction.
“My husband, I love him,” she continued, “but as much as I want him to be enlightened, I want him to unload the dishwasher! If he’s like, ‘I’m going to meditate for an hour,’ I’d be like, ‘No, you’re really not!’ ”
Her question was simple: how do I pull this off, and what advice did I have for parents?
I let the laughter subside, and then cracked wise. “One thing immediately that I think would be an easy fix is: have you thought about giving your kids up for adoption?” I will always take the low-hanging joke.
Then I actually answered her question. First I said, “I have a very understanding wife.” I won’t lie: my decision to go to two hours a day definitely created some tension initially, in part because I made the supremely unwise decision to unilaterally institute my new policy while we had a six-month-old around the house. But by the time of the Newton South event, I’d been doing my two-hour-a-day thing for about eighteen months, and Bianca and I had figured out a system that mostly worked. As I told Carla, “We talk about it. I often say, ‘How can we do this so it’s not coming out of your bank account?’ ” Meaning: how could I do this without making it so that Bianca was constantly left to fend for herself with the child?
I pulled it off largely by being strategic about my daily schedule, as per the pro tip “Think Strategically About Your Schedule.” I allow myself to sit whenever I can, wherever I can, and in as many intervals as I want. In some ways, my chaotic schedule has been helpful. I work GMA on the weekends and Nightline several nights during the week. Plus I travel a ton. So this means I can sneak in quick meditations early in the morning or late at night. I also sit while I’m on airplanes, in the backseat of taxis, or even in my office. When I’m home, I try never to meditate if my son is awake, so I fit it in during the day when he’s not around. If, by the end of the day, I have not gotten to two hours, I forgo a few minutes of sleep, or make it up the next day. I admit that it’s all a bit nutty, but I seem to be muddling through.
I realize, of course, that not every parent has this option. Which is why I told Carla, “You’re at a point right now where you need to write yourself a permission slip that says, ‘Okay, I’m not going to get a ton of meditation done right now.’ But can you find those little spots?”
A man in the audience weighed in with a tip he’d picked up from his wife. “She meditates in her car, in the parking garage, at work,” he said. Her mistake, though: “She finally shared that with her senior management team and now they know where to find her.”
Back to my two-hours-a-day thing: There is no question in my mind that it has deepened my practice and improved my life. Sustained sitting time has allowed me to see my inner patterns with finer resolution, helping me better understand my own mind, and giving me increased empathy for how crazy we all are. I also—and this is going to sound a bit Jeff-y—feel that peering inward with greater frequency has enabled me to bump up against fundamental truths (everything is impermanent, and therefore clinging is a recipe for suffering) and universal mysteries (who the hell is the “I,” the “Dan,” who is observing it all?). Despite the fact that going to two hours created some initial domestic turbulence, Bianca says it has been really good for our relationship. My resting post-meditation face is more open and approachable, I take more of an interest in her day, and I exhibit more patience with the cacophony of parenting. The only potential downside, as she has joked, is that I meditate so much that she feels she doesn’t have to.
I don’t want to sugarcoat it, though: finding the time can be a serious pain. Which is why my daily megadose is not for everyone. And remember, I started with just five minutes a day.
PRO TIP: Novel Idea: Try Enjoying Meditation
There was an even more deeply humbling moment toward the end of the night, when Jeff pointed out that, for all the tips and tricks we were throwing out to get people to meditate, we’d been missing a big one. “How many people here meditate because they enjoy it?” he asked.
A surprising number of people—to me, at least—raised their hands. “There is another thing going on here, which is just the pure enjoyment of sitting in your body,” said Jeff. “Everything in our culture is about external rewards,” he added, but in fact, “you’ve got it all right here.” He motioned toward his torso. “To be able to just take a moment to sit back and feel what it feels like to be a human being is a privilege.”
While Jeff’s riff earlier in the day about “enjoying your beingness” had fallen a bit flat for me, this one managed to hit home. Dismiss it as woo-woo if you want, but there is genuine power in tuning in to the blazingly obvious fact that you are alive.
It reminded me of that sketch from Saturday Night Live where Dan Aykroyd plays President Jimmy Carter fielding live phone calls on the radio. A freaked-out teenager named Peter calls in and says, “Uh…I uh…I took some acid…I’m afraid to leave my apartment, and I can’t wear any clothes…and the ceiling is dripping.” Aykroyd/Carter responds by telling Peter to take some vitamins, drink a beer, and listen to the Allman Brothers. “Just remember you’re a living organism on this planet, and you’re very safe.”
It also reminded me of how, when I had looked at the videos of Jeff and me from our “wandering retreat” a few months prior, he’d always had this goofy-yet-awesome look on his face when he was meditating, like he was actually having a good time. My mug, by contrast, looked all pinched from the effort.
Sitting there with Jeff on that stage, I realized that while I did have truly pleasurable, fascinating, and meaningful moments in meditation, my daily scramble to get in my two hours had too often taken on the feel of a forced march. I was overlooking what could be the most powerful motivator of them all. And it stung.
I turned to Jeff and admitted, “I don’t meditate because it feels good. I meditate because, grr, I’m just supposed to do it.”
“I’m noticing that about you,” said Jeff. “We’ve got to work on that.”
Ouch. I knew he didn’t mean it as a criticism. He meant that enjoyment is something you can train. Good thing I was about to spend the next week and a half cooped up on a ridiculous bus with one of the best meditation teachers in the world.
Jeff, in his role as MacGyver, devised a meditation specifically to help you build the muscle of enjoyment.
For this meditation, we’ll continue to work with the breath, but we’ll expand to include the sense of our physical body as well. Enjoying the body.
When I hear “enjoying the body,” I feel like you’re going to start talking about something lewd.
That’s because you’re a talking head on TV, totally disconnected from your body. I used to be the same: for years my body was just an appendage my mind dragged around behind me, forcing it to do stupid shit. Meditation helped me get back in touch, and enjoyment is a key skill.
So, again, you’re saying that enjoyment is trainable, like concentration?
The two are actually related: the more we enjoy a sensation, the more concentrated we can become, which in turn increases the enjoyment. It’s a feedback loop, part of working smart. And enjoyment doesn’t mean you’re blissed-out topless on your cushion covered in massage oil. It’s more modest.
Example, please.
Try to notice the sensation of air on the back of your hands right now. Can you find something very subtly pleasant about that?
Sure, I guess. But you are setting the bar very low here.
That’s all you need to get on the enjoyment gradient. It’s basically an attitude, the capacity to appreciate something a hair above neutrality. You don’t need enjoyment to benefit from meditation, but it can deepen the effects.
The moment you say, “This is about enjoyment!” you can pretty much guarantee that half the readers are going to experience annoying discomfort and persistent itches in places they never knew they could have itches.
Totally fine. Enjoyment is simply an option that might be available. Our primary task is to concentrate on the breath or the body, and to accept any other sensations that may be there in the background. Equanimity is a training to face the whole of experience, including any boring or uncomfortable parts.
But then, just for fun, we see if there isn’t actually something a wee bit enjoyable about the breath and the body, even with those itches and pains and tensions in the background. Enjoyment is more an attitude than anything else, but our attitudes can radically change the way we experience things. So do the experiment—decide ahead of time to be open to enjoyment. Don’t chase it; let it come to you. It’s important to keep it light. We don’t want to compromise our equanimity by getting all hedonistic and pigging out on the good feels. We are learning the delicate art of experiencing pleasurable sensations without grasping, and painful sensations without pushing. This is one of the primary skills of mindfulness, something we’ll come back to again and again.
What if it doesn’t work?
If it doesn’t work, don’t worry about it—as I said, you can still get plenty of benefits.
ENJOYING THE BODY
5 minutes or more
Close your eyes (or keep them half open) and take a few deep breaths. Each exhale is an opportunity to smooth out the lines of the face a bit, to relax the throat and shoulders. Try to notice any settling that happens on the exhale—the way the diaphragm relaxes, or the way the body sinks in exhaustion because, frankly, you are working too hard and you should meditate more.
Focus on the sensation of breathing at the nose or the chest or the belly. You can use a note here if you like: in, out or rising, falling. Breathe naturally, like you’ve done a billion other times in your life. Except this time you’re doing it with the attitude of deciding to find this experience enjoyable, instead of practicing within the Dan Harris School of Funereal Endurance. It can feel nice just to breathe—again, nothing dramatic, just a hair above neutrality.
There are different ways to connect to this enjoyment quality. It may be that the sensation of breathing is already subtly pleasurable for you, in which case just run with that, focusing on exactly that soft and subtle quality. Or sometimes a bit of mental reframing helps—for example, you might connect to the idea that the oxygen is filling you with vitality. Or that the breathing is a kind of massage for your insides. Or just that it feels good to be a large bipedal ape with an operational set of lungs. As always, you’re allowed to completely fake it until at some point you accidentally find that some understated quality of enjoyment may indeed be happening. And if no enjoyment arises, no problem. It’s simply an option.
After a few minutes, shift your attention to the sense of your whole body sitting. Try to notice that the feeling of your breath is rising and falling inside the larger feeling of your body. Anytime you notice any uptightness—about anything—breathe out, and soften through your front. Can you bring a subtle sense of enjoyment to being in your body? The sexy, invigorating animality of it all. Smiling helps, even a noncommittal Mona Lisa half-grin. Appreciating the existential hilarity of sitting with your eyes closed in your living room (or wherever), tripping out on the feeling of having a body.
So you’re still focused on the sensation of breathing, only now you’ve widened the bandwidth a bit so you are aware of your body too. If thoughts and sounds pass through this container, no worries. In fact, screw them. Screw those thoughts, but screw them in a friendly, enjoyable way. Not hating on them—it’s more that you don’t give a toss one way or another. Sounds and thoughts just passing by, but you are grooving on the feeling of breathing and having a body, like a pleasure-loving hippie truant at Burning Man. No one ever needs to know.
Enjoying the breath, the body, the meditation. When you’re almost done, stop meditating altogether, and just sit or lie back with your eyes closed for a few minutes. Relaxing, enjoying the rest. When you’re ready, open your eyes.
The real learning with meditation is always how it affects you in the world. You can explore bringing an attitude of relaxed enjoyment to any activity, anytime: walking, moving your hands, exercising, even lying down and stretching luxuriously like a jungle cat. Lots of folks do this instinctively; why not do it intentionally?
We need reasons to reinforce life’s easy positives, to counter what some contemplative neuroscientists like to call the brain’s “negativity bias” (the near-universal human tendency to overfocus on the slings and arrows of fortune). This is one relatively straightforward way to do this. And, as with everything, it gets easier with practice.
CHEAT SHEET
1. Breathe normally, and try to tune in to the soft feeling of inhaling and exhaling. If it helps, note in as you breathe in and out as you breathe out.
2. Bring an attitude of enjoyment to the activity. Maybe there’s a sense of refreshment as you inhale, or relaxation as you exhale, or some part of the sensation that feels kind of nice. Fake it if necessary. Pretend you’re on drugs.
3. After a few minutes, shift your attention to the feeling of your whole body sitting. Imagine relaxing into your body like you’re relaxing into a hot tub, opening to whatever body sensations are present.
PRO TIPS
• Be comfortable. Sit in an easy chair if you have to, or a couch. When the body is relaxed, everything is more enjoyable. You can also do the meditation lying down, but know that you may fall asleep!
• Related to this, you can alter your environment to make things more agreeable. Many practitioners create a cozy go-to meditation spot with candles and a plant and whatever sights and smells and sounds please them. I highly recommend doing the same if you can. Or make it a movable feast—sit under a tree, or in a bath, or in bed with a warm cup of tea in your hands.
• Explore a simple visualization. You can use your creativity to make practice more enjoyable—that’s totally legit. Imaginative ideas can be a powerful way to frame and shape our experience. So you can imagine breathing up from the ground, or your body becoming suffused with light, or dissolving in a warm bath. What do you think all those ancient forest monks did before they had Netflix?
• Get sensual. You can enjoy the body the way you enjoy any other sensual pleasure. You can either just tune in to a sensation and decide to find it delightful, or you can scan the body looking for subtly pleasurable feelings that may already be there (like tingling in the hands, or the automatic relaxation of the diaphragm on the exhale). To repeat: the key to enjoying sensations isn’t to grasp at them, but to let them come to you. It’s a practice of receiving. For some people this comes naturally; for others it’s harder to grok. That’s okay—it’s one reason we practice.
After the talk in Newton, Jeff and I mingled with the crowd, took questions, and posed for seemingly endless selfies. I sometimes get slightly uncomfortable in these situations, especially if people profess to have liked my book. I feel like I might let them down in person. Also—even though, as a needy anchorman, I enjoy the attention—my emotional reserve can run dry at the end of a long day. (My wife could write a whole book on this subject.) Jeff, by contrast, appears to have a lot more gas in his tank, so to speak. As I peered over at him standing near the other side of the stage, schmoozing with audience members and giving them tips on their meditation practice, he was clearly having a blast.
Later, I walked the halls of my old school with three members of the Brain Trust, Larry, Jason, and Dave. Larry and I had been best friends since age two; we walked to school together every day, and when we were in a fight, we walked on opposite sides of the street. Jason and I used to spray-paint graffiti tags on local train stations. Dave had been captain of the football team back in the day and now worked here at our alma mater, coaching lacrosse.
As Dave showed us around, he pointed out that much of the school had been remodeled. Even the parts that hadn’t changed looked utterly unfamiliar to me, though.
“I don’t remember anything,” I said.
“You didn’t spend a lot of time here,” said Dave, smiling.
While the physical plant didn’t provoke any memories, simply being with my friends did. I recalled the time when we tied Dave to the banister in his front hallway so he couldn’t make it to class. Or the multiple times when we used to pull the fire alarm outside Larry’s house and then hide in the woods and watch him explain himself to the firefighters. Oh, and my favorite hijinks: calling local fast-food restaurants and claiming to be managers from nearby franchises that had run out of burgers. We would then send in one of our buddies to collect the patties so we could have a barbecue.
As Dave wrapped up his tour, he brought us to the place where our group of friends had kept our lockers. As I stared at the scene of numberless intrigues, alliances, and heartbreaks, I suddenly found myself confronting a completely different issue related to time—not how to find time to meditate, but instead how to come to terms with the fact that so many years had already whipped by in my own life.
“It feels like a long time ago,” I said.
“Nineteen eighty-nine’s pretty far away, fellas,” said Dave, which we greeted with a bittersweet belly laugh.
The 1989 version of me wouldn’t have been able to imagine the middle-aged dad who stood here now. In my early twenties, during my first job in television, in Bangor, Maine, where most of the people on staff were right out of college, we referred to one of the other reporters (a guy in his late twenties) as “Jurassic Mark.” Now here I was in my old high school at forty-five, slightly punch-drunk from the passage of time, and wincing slightly at my own image in all those selfies I’d just taken because my inner Robert Johnson said my features looked pointy and Tolkien-esque.
But here’s the thing about meditation: as Jeff’s longtime teacher Shinzen Young says, meditation extends your life—not necessarily by making you live longer, but by boosting your level of focus, so that you’re squeezing more juice out of every moment.
It does something else, too. As Jeff had said quite eloquently during the event, meditation “accelerates the ‘aging gracefully’ gradient.”
“You can age badly, and you can age well,” he said. “I know affable older folks who sit in the park and watch the kids play, and they’ve got that good-natured, easygoing quality. A serious practice just makes that happen sooner in your life, so you have it in the middle of your life, or even earlier. You get to have the best of being old while you’re still a little more sprightly.”
Yes. That’s why we do this.
Shortly thereafter we loaded onto the bus for a long, overnight drive. Susa Talan, a staffer at the 10% Happier company, had instituted a count-off system to make sure we didn’t lose anyone. We used numbers, and I was ten. It was fun to listen to everyone call out their numbers; it almost made me feel young again, after having been so powerfully reminded of my infirmity by the visit to my high school.
I was a little worried about the next day, though. Some of the people we were supposed to be interviewing were bailing on us at the last minute—ironically because of the very obstacle we were hoping to confront next.