I.45 — Pleasure

Taste something good and notice what the mind does within a few seconds: it starts calculating how to keep the taste going, how many bites are left, whether there will be another serving. The pleasure is still happening and attention has already left it to go manage its ending.

That managing is the grip, and it is worth being precise about what it is not. It is not the pleasure itself, which needs no correction. This is not a tradition that asks anyone to want less, taste less, or treat enjoyment with suspicion. A good meal, a warm room, an afternoon with nothing required of it, none of that is the problem.

The problem, when there is one, is the clench that turns a pleasure into a hunger: the bite eaten while already grieving the last bite, the good evening spent partly worrying about when the next one will come. That clench does not add to the enjoyment. It subtracts from it, by moving half the attention off the actual taste and onto the future absence of the taste.

Try it with one meal. Eat slowly enough to notice the exact moment attention drifts from the food to the ending of the food, and see that drift plainly, without judging it. Then bring attention back to what is actually in the mouth. Pleasure fully tasted, without the clench, tends to be larger, not smaller.