Arthur C. Brooks recalls his mother, a mixed-media artist, teaching him to draw by staring hard at a tree, noticing every contour and shadow. He connects this to savoring: the practice of paying close attention to any experience, which he says can transform your well-being.
My late mother, she was a terrific mixed media artist. Many people in the Pacific Northwest own her paintings. She was really into the arts and a creative soul, to be sure. I remember asking her, I was probably 13 or 14 years old, how I could improve as an artist. And I expected her to say, "Do it a lot. Get the reps." Which certainly is true. That's not what she told me. She said, "Here's the reason that people can't draw, because they actually never look at the thing they're trying to draw." She said, "Look deeply at the thing you're trying to draw, that you want to draw. Think about it and look at it again. Stare at it. Look at the nuances, then try." I was actually trying to draw a tree, simple thing, right? And I would look at it and try to draw the tree. Didn't look like a tree. Didn't look very good at all. Then I really stared at it. I really took in the details of what I was looking at. I wasn't relying on my brain to fill in the details. I was actually observing the details, the contours, the colors, the shadows, and I drew a pretty good tree. Now, here's the point of that. I was also happy. I remember being really happy, not because the tree looked good, but because the whole experience was rich. What was that? It turns out that that was an experience of what we call savoring. Savoring experiences in life, neutral experiences, good experiences, even bad experiences, can be fundamentally game-changing in your well-being.
