A few months ago, on a Sunday, I was out to dinner with my wife and daughter. I can’t remember where our older guy was that day, or what the three of us had done before we stopped into one of our favorite haunts, but I do remember being struck by the elderly couple at the table just behind my wife and my then nine year old daughter, as I faced them.
The wife had a walker folded up between the wall and their table. She seemed to speak sparingly, and a few times I noticed what looked like her husband reaching across with his napkin toward her face. He was attentive in a way that didn’t feel performative, it felt practiced. He helped his wife in small, subtle ways, without drawing attention to it. There was a tenderness to the scene that didn’t need to announce itself, yet if you captured it in a single image, it could almost be paired with a caption that was both morbid and beautifully sentimental, “it’s almost over.”
And that is true for all things, at some point in time. Our dinner was almost over that night when we passed on the dessert menu. My daughter’s first decade on this planet was almost over as she turned 10 later that month. Childhood itself is almost over for my son. And one day, for all of us, life itself will be almost over.
Now, to be clear, I don’t intend this to be a blog meant to depress you. But the transience of life is not something we can ignore, even when we’d prefer to. It sits in the background of everything, quietly reminding us that time is moving whether we’re paying attention or not. The question is what we do with that reality. We can meet it with despondency, or we can let it sharpen our awareness and deepen our gratitude for the ordinary moments that, in retrospect, were never ordinary at all. Because the real tragedy is not that life ends, it’s that so much of it goes unnoticed while it’s still happening.
The Problem Isn’t That Life Lacks Meaning
The problem is that we stop noticing it.
Most people don’t lose their lives in a single catastrophic decision. They lose them slowly, through distraction, preoccupation, and the unconscious belief that real life is always somewhere else. When I get through this season, when work calms down, when we have more money, when my body feels better… We postpone presence as if it’s a luxury, and we treat our current life as if it’s merely a precursor to the good life that awaits when those stars finally align.
There are a few psychological forces that drive this phenomenon, and understanding them, along with introducing one or two relatively simple tweaks to your thinking, can go a long way toward helping you reclaim the life that’s already happening in front of you.
One explanation is something called habituation. Your brain is designed to conserve energy, so it stops paying attention to what is familiar. That’s not a moral failure or a sign that you’re ungrateful, it’s efficiency, wired into your neural programming. The problem is that the most meaningful parts of life often become the most familiar, the people you love, the routines that hold you together, and the simple pleasures you stop noticing. Familiarity dulls attention, and attention is where meaning resides.
Another force is velocity. A rushed life is almost always an unnoticed life. When you live in a constant state of frenetic catching up, your mind becomes trained to scan for problems, anticipate the next demand, and move on. You stop inhabiting moments, and instead, you manage them.
And then there’s what I’ll call emotional bracing. Many people don’t notice their lives because they’re living in that split second before impact, braced, tense, waiting for something to go wrong. If I slow down, I might feel grief. If I pay attention, I might feel how tired I am. If I let this moment matter, I might feel how fleeting it is. So we stay busy. We stay ahead of ourselves. We live in the future because the present is sometimes just too honest.
The Cost of Noticing Too Late
The tragedy isn’t that we don’t have enough good moments.
The tragedy is that we often realize what mattered after it has changed, or passed, or become impossible to recover.
Sometimes I open the basement door and feel myself get instantly aggravated by the mess at the bottom of the stairs, toys everywhere, dolls on the floor, utter disarray. And then I have to remind myself that there will come a day, sooner than I’d like, when that basement is always as tidy as I left it. No Barbie dolls. No clutter. No little traces of childhood. And I will miss the mess.
We don’t miss life because it was empty. We miss it because we weren’t paying attention while it was full.
“Savoring” isn’t a concept that originated in psychology, but the practice of sitting with the idea is something we use to help people orient their attention to the life happening right in front of them, so they can participate more freely, and with greater awareness of its richness. And from a Christian perspective, even with the difficulty and suffering that are woven into life (more on that in the next blog), there is still an opportunity, and I would argue a responsibility, to receive the present moment as a gift from God, and to savor it accordingly. It’s not a matter of temperament or personality, and it isn’t reserved for naturally mindful people. It’s a discipline, and for many of us, it’s a necessary one.
Because if you don’t practice noticing, life will still move, but you won’t be there for it.
Savoring Is a Skill
And like any skill, it can (and must) be practiced.
Savoring is the intentional act of attending to what is good, meaningful, or beautiful in the present moment, not to deny what is hard, but to stop letting the hard eclipse everything else.
Savoring is how you reclaim your life from autopilot.
It’s how you train your nervous system to register safety and goodness, not just threat and urgency.
And it’s one of the simplest ways I know to make life feel more substantial without changing anything external.
How to Practice Noticing
Not in theory. This week.
Here are a few practices that are realistic, even for busy people.
1) Name the moment while you’re in it
This is almost embarrassingly simple, and that’s why it works.
Pick one moment per day and quietly label it, in your mind or out loud:
This is a good moment.
This matters.
This is what I’ll miss one day.
You’re not trying to manufacture emotion. You’re training attention.
2) Put one ordinary thing under a spotlight
Savoring doesn’t require a vacation. It requires a spotlight.
Choose one routine part of your day and treat it like it deserves your full presence:
Coffee in the morning.
Walking to the car.
Dinner with your family.
A conversation with your child.
The quiet after the house finally settles.
Don’t rush it. Don’t multitask it. Stay with it.
3) Practice “specific gratitude”
General gratitude is fine, but specific gratitude changes the brain.
Not, I’m grateful for my family.
But, I’m grateful my daughter still wants to tell me about her day.
I’m grateful for the sound of my wife laughing at the table.
I’m grateful my body carried me through today.
I’m grateful for warm food and unhurried conversation.
Specificity is what makes gratitude real.
4) Take one photo you never post
This one surprises people.
Take a photo of something ordinary, not for content, not for a flex, not for anyone else. Just as a way of saying, I saw this.
A messy basement floor.
A sunset through the windshield.
Your kid sleeping soundly in his or her bed.
Your spouse focused on something small.
A private archive of presence.
5) Ask one question at the end of the day
Before sleep, ask:
What did I almost miss today?
Don’t answer with shame. Answer with curiosity. The point is not to punish yourself for distraction, it’s to build a noticing reflex.
A Quiet Reframe
Most people think the goal is to get a better life.
Often the goal is to stop missing the life you already have.
If you’ve been reading along with these blogs, remember the First Principle of Mental Health: the quality of your life is predicated on the quality of your narrative. It’s safe to say that your narrative is going to heavily emphasize the things you pay attention to. That doesn’t mean you ignore what’s hard. It means you refuse to let what’s hard become the only thing you can see.
Because one day, you’ll sit in a restaurant, or in your living room, or at a table with people you love, and you’ll realize the moment is fragile.
And the best time to start noticing is before you’re forced to.
Here’s a question worth sitting with this week:
Where am I living on autopilot, and what might I be missing because of it?
Be well.