How to Like Everything More

Move your attention beyond the part that you immediately focused on. This is especially easy and helpful with music—Visions of Johanna and You Oughta Know both feature spectacular bass parts that you might under-notice if you’re focusing on the attention-grabbing lead vocal.

Interpreting a stimulus as an assault involves a reflexive mental clenching against it, a form of active resistance. Dropping that lets you experience powerful stimuli as intense rather than annoying. See if you can hear the screaming in this song, for example,as an attempt to convey the intensity of romantic engagement. Get curious about the voice’s texture, its qualities as an instrument, instead of rejecting it immediately—curiosity instantly inverts resistance. You might be surprised by how much internal variation the vocalist uses from phrase to phrase if you can get past just hearing it as “scream scream scream.” If you dare, try the same trick with the onslaught presented by this piece of music.

The same trick of dropping resistance and adopting curiosity will also work for: spicy or pungent foods, humor that initially strikes you as too crass, avant-garde paintings that seem aggressively ugly, and conversationalists who are difficult.

When you’re hungry and you take a bite of food, can you notice all the parts of you that are relaxing — in your neck, or your lower body? Often, noticing that a person is making you feel warmhearted will increase the power of this warmhearted feeling, and, due to regular human telepathy, this will naturally make the interaction feel more sincere for the other person, too.

If you don’t have any vocabulary for a medium, then the film or song or dish simply appears as a blur of impressions, it’s hard to draw lines and isolate the particular areas and causes of enjoyment. So, having a better vocabulary for a given medium doesn’t just make you sound smart, it increases the resolution of your enthusiasm. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys undirected study, simply browsing glossaries of terminology can help. But a more approachable way to do this is absorbing the work of a respected critic re: material you already enjoy.

Here’s a refreshing, electric mode of attention that you can choose at any moment: notice every beginning—like, every new drum hit, or every new color that hits your eye when you scan a scene. Try to keep your attention hovering on that horizon where stimuli emerge from nonexistence. This is wonderful for music with a lot of abrupt changes. Better for more regularized music is the opposite, “noting gone,” a meditation technique advocated by Shinzen Young, where you pay attention to every instance of a sensation dropping out of view—this is a less fluttery form of attention that creates a tighter embrace with the present moment. You might accidentally have a mystical experience doing either.

In my mind, this is the only real way to enjoy poetry. It takes time to reveal all the intricacies of what a poet at the level of, say, John Berryman, is doing, and the best way to participate in that revelation is to keep a poem going in your head at the grocery store. You don’t have to memorize whole poems, although that’s a fun challenge—you can just internalize little bits. I highly recommend spending some time with the last six lines of this poem.

Just give it a second

The basic like/dislike reactions that blandify our existences can be subdued through meditation and therapy, to some extent. But you can also often just… give it a second, and refuse your internal compass’ direction to go somewhere else immediately when you have a knee-jerk reaction to a thing or person. If you have a strong negative reaction to the first scene in a movie, see if you can sit with that, let it pass, and watch the second scene as if the film has been newly exposed to you. I’m very glad I did this with Dogville, which pissed me off immediately—it ended up being one of my top 5 movies ever.