I want to obey them. After a slow moving checkout line during which I have read “5 Ways to Make Each Day Count” (or 7 Ways to Get the Most out of Your Time, or, perhaps, 6 Ways to Make Every Moment Last), I’ll try it out. I go home and become inspired to cook. I will eat low-fat fish with omega-3 acids that will nurture every organ in me. I will eat a healthful but delicious salad of only the freshest vegetables. The meal will leave me satisfied but (as such articles always emphasize), NOT FULL. Most importantly, I will chew the fish slowly. I will get every bit of juice out of it. I will enjoy the fish juice and hold it in my mouth and name its many flavors. I will eat the fish so slowly that, in fact, it will be breakfast time before I’m even halfway through.

The plan disintegrates somewhere around the time when I realize that I don’t have any fish that’s not in stick form and the only lettuce is growing mold at the bottom of the vegetable bin. As a backup, I boil plain penne pasta: and don’t savor it at all. I feel put upon to have to drain the water and do a lot of sampling directly from the pot, even when I know that it’s not near done. It’s even worse if I happen to be actually in a nice restaurant. Everything from the low mood lighting to the waiter’s “And how are we this evening?” tells me to relax, to take it easy, to let everything I want be taken care of. Such a situation makes me exceedingly nervous. I get jittery and jumpy. I think very hard about how I’m not supposed to fill up on bread. I then grant myself permission to eat five pieces, reasoning that it’s not really “filling up,” per se, and that I ought to take advantage of the free things in life. If the food takes a long time, I decide that it will never come, ever, and so I eat more bread.

I am also a bad sunset watcher. Some people can, without a hint of pretentiousness, sit and gaze at the sun go down and have all sorts of beautiful poetic thoughts. My thoughts: Isn’t there something I ought to be doing? Some people can walk step by step, so slowly through a museum. Some people can stare at a painting for fifteen minutes and not know that they’re doing it. No matter how slow I try to go through museums, there’s always someone several paces behind me, showing me up, looking much more closely, demonstrating that they’re far more cultured than I. I theoretically like museums. I like sunsets, in actuality. But trying to enjoy them, trying to look deep within them long and hard does nothing but make me self-conscious of looking deep within them long and hard.

The problem that stands between me and the artificial way of savoring is a self-consciousness. Once you’re conscious of yourself trying to make things last, you aren’t really focused on anything but yourself. There might be a sunset there but you aren’t really seeing it if you’re forcing your eyes to look and keep looking.

Writing, then, is how I savor. Somehow, the only way I can seem to slow myself down is to make myself into creator since creation is, by its nature, slow. In writing, I am not artificially trying to slow myself down, saying to myself “Hold on, there, why don’t you weigh every option you have for this word: is that really what you want to say?” That’s what happens anyway. I write painfully slowly: so much more slowly than any of my peers who have cast me in their eyes as a “writer type” even believe. I write, word by word, so slowly that if I’m listening to music whole songs will go by with no background sound of my fingers tapping any keys.