Taking Care of the Minutes: A Conversation with Dr. Rick Hanson

My suggestion is simple. Test these practices yourself. Run through one five or ten times in a single day, do that for a few days running, and watch what happens. I would be surprised if you didn't notice a shift in how you feel.

Erik mentioned that he'd been going along with the well-being exercise while Dr. Hanson walked through it. Demanding, he said, but there was pleasure in it too.

Dr. Hanson picked up on that. There's something odd about it, he said, even among people who work in mental health. We treat it almost as off-limits to pause and actually take in a plain good experience, to hold it for ten seconds, which is really just two breaths, around a dozen seconds total. Strange, when you think about it. And yet without that pause, an experience never makes the trip from the short-term memory buffer into long-term storage. It feels nice for a second and then it's gone, leaving nothing behind.

With a couple of minutes left, Erik asked whether there was anything else worth hearing before they wrapped up.

Dr. Hanson said he wanted to end on a line he comes back to often. In Tibet there's a saying: if you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves. He finds that both hopeful and sobering. Hopeful because a minute is such a small thing to handle. Sobering because the minute is yours alone, and nobody else can tend to it for you.

The most important minute, he said, is the one coming next. The past is closed; we can't touch it. Anything more than a few minutes out sits too far away for us to steer. What we actually have is the minute right in front of us, then the one after that, then the next, all day long. That's where our life is happening.

A handful of times each day, those minutes hand us something ordinary and good: a moment of contentment, a flash of gratitude, a bit of self-confidence, a feeling of care for someone else. Hanson's phrase for it is gathering the everyday jewels and working them into the fabric of the nervous system, and by extension into the fabric of a life. The alternative is to let them slip past unused. Nobody else is going to stop us from wasting them.

But do the gathering, he said, weave the moments in, and something real happens. Minute by minute, day by day, you slowly heal and change. It brought to his mind a line from Buddhism: think not lightly of good, saying it will not come to me. Drop by drop the water pot is filled. In the same way the wise person, taking it little by little, fills with good.