– Thomas Lux

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It’s been a cloudy few weeks. The evenings are getting a little lighter, but that light can be a bit odd, and seems to be very dependent on the weather. Overcast twilight making the sky dark like midwinter and the odd clear evening in which it’s still light enough to read at 5pm.

All of this has got me thinking about Spring, and the pleasures and neuroscience of delayed gratification. Experiments in this field stretch back some 60 years (at least) and are maybe most famously encapsulated in the marshmallow experiment in which Walter Mischel and his colleagues at Stanford tested (or tempted?) four year olds with the dilemma of having a marshmallow now, or waiting for the promise of two.

The longer term studies suggested that people who were able to delay their gratification in the tests also had quite a wide range of positive outcomes in other aspects of their lives. Recently it’s been possible to use MRI scanners to examine the parts of the brain that successfully allow people to use ‘cooling’ tactics when faced with temptation versus those who plump for instant reward via ‘hot’ tactics. It’s well worth a google to see what approaches people use.

I think that the application of these studies for coaches in their work with clients is quite useful. Helping people to explore the ways in which they make the choice between a short term gain versus a longer term plan can really aid them in choosing better paths. There’s strong evidence that it’s possible to practice deferring gratification and, by doing so, improve that ability in a similar fashion to exercising a muscle. The neuroscience maxim that “neurons that fire together, wire together” gives us all hope that we can learn this ability, even if we are a bit older than a 4 year old sat in front of a table with a marshmallow on it.

But what I really wanted to talk about in this blog was actually some poetry and art that set me off on these ponderings. The art that flicked the first domino on this for me was ‘Long distance’ by Lucy Pass (at the head of the post). 

https://www.lucy-pass.com/works-on-panel-2024?pgid=lymrjicy-f3517558-9d7d-430e-a146-fef267659b12

There’s something hugely compelling about how Lucy focuses and paints only sections of the portrait, leaving the viewer to fill in the gaps, suggested by adroitly drawn lines and symbols. In the painting in question Lucy has added a red dot, which immediately put me in mind of Thomas Lux’s poem Refrigerator, 1957.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/06/magazine19970728refrigerator-1957

Lux has a wonderful way of drawing the profound out of the everyday, and this poem with its evocative imagery of a sad fridge of meagre leftovers, framing a jar of barely touched maraschino cherries has stayed with me ever since I first read it. The promise of the cherries, the very concept of them is almost more enticing than it would be to eat them.

Quite a few years ago I delivered some CPD sessions on the benefits and risks of optimism, which referred to the studies showing how people gained a lot of pleasure from the contemplation of attaining something that had been long desired. Surprisingly, what it found was that people often (conceptually) wanted the desired thing to happen in a week’s time, rather than instantly. The conclusions were that we could find real pleasure in the anticipation of a thing. Possibly more pleasure in the anticipating than in the achieving. 

The ramifications for all of this, and the relevance, are all really case dependent. But they’re useful factors to bear in mind when a coaching client is facing difficulties reaching their goals, or is feeling flat having done so. I think that there’s also pleasure in looking back on achievements and reflecting on the journey that got you there. 

To that end, I’ll share one more link:

Home

‘Delayed Gratification’ is also the journal of the Slow News movement – proudly proclaiming themselves to be ‘last to the breaking news’. This superb almanac is a wonderful way to deal with the rush of information that we get in modernity. Their considered pieces take the time to assess what is on the news agenda and to add the depth and context and perspective that the rolling news is unable to provide. It’s well worth checking out.

Right, I’m now off to anticipate a gloriously sunny spring. (Please don’t puncture my optimism)

*many thanks to Lucy Pass for agreeing to let me use her beautiful work