How to Find the Magic in Everyday Life ft. Thoreau and Eric Weiner | The Happiness Lab Podcast

Key Takeaway

Take a 10-minute “tourist walk” in a familiar place today: leave your phone away, choose no destination, and look for three details you normally rush past—a sound, pattern, color, or interaction. Resist labeling them immediately as ordinary or annoying. Eric Weiner’s Thoreau-inspired practice is to slow the mind’s automatic assumptions, which can reveal beauty and interest in everyday settings while building flexibility for how you interpret bigger challenges.

Episode Overview

Dr. Laurie Santos speaks with author Eric Weiner about Henry David Thoreau’s central lesson: learning how to see more fully. Drawing on Weiner’s experience retracing Thoreau’s life for The Socrates Express, they explore slow observation, walking without an agenda, loosening expectations, and deliberately seeking beauty in ordinary places.

Full Transcript

Transcript of How to Find the Magic in Everyday Life ft. Thoreau and Eric Weiner | The Happiness Lab Podcast from The Happiness Lab. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Pushkin. If you're a fan of The Happiness Lab, you know we talk a lot about the power of attention. How small changes in what we focus on can have a significant impact on our psychological well-being. But making these changes is often easier said than done. Many of us have many things in life to be grateful for. Friends, family, maybe a wonderful pet. There are also all the little things. A TV show you really enjoy, that first sip of coffee in the morning, or cutting open an avocado and discovering that it's perfectly ripe.

But at a time when we are bombarded with scary news about artificial intelligence, war, and climate, when it is so easy to spend hours scrolling through online pages of doom, these good things can start to take a back seat. So how do we change this? How do we stop the stressful things that consume so much of our attention so we can appreciate the wonderful things that still exist? Well, for the final episode of our fall book series, I decided to enlist a little help. My name is Eric Weiner, and I am a traveling philosopher or a traveling philosopher, depending on how you look at it.

Eric is a journalist by training . He worked for years as a foreign correspondent for NPR before turning his attention to philosophy. He is now the author of several bestsellers on philosophical topics. But today I'd like to talk to him about a philosopher, a scientist, who I think offers an important solution to our modern attention crisis. Henry David Thoreau. I've been thinking a lot about Thoreau lately . You see, I was spending time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on my writing sabbatical, and Walden Pond, the place Thoreau wrote about, is about a 20-minute drive from my house .

It is incredibly beautiful there in autumn. The trees are just starting to change color, the summer tourists have almost disappeared, and the sounds of wildlife can be heard all around . And the soft rumble of the Fitchburg railroad in the distance. These sounds were familiar to Thoreau himself when he lived here . I try to feel his presence as I walk around the pond. Something Eric has done many times as well. I am a person who loves places. I am a traveler. I need to go somewhere.

As soon as I get an idea for a book or something , I don't really think about what, I think about where. Where can I go? This instinct led Eric around the world as he wrote the book I'd like to talk to him about today, "The Socratic Express." "In search of life lessons from dead philosophers." And so, you know, I went to Athens, of course, following in the footsteps of Socrates, Epicurus, the Stoics, and others. I went to Germany in the footsteps of Schopenhauer. The idea was to reduce or reduce their vast philosophies to one simple question-instruction.

I did n't want it to be something complicated, like how to disambiguate a categorical imperative. Nothing that crazy. These are things like how to get out of bed, how to wonder, how to see , how to listen, how to enjoy. As well as practical questions for later life, how not to have regrets, how to cope with difficulties, and even how to die. The idea is that each of these 14 philosophers answers this question that came through me. So my book is interactive. I try not just to study these philosophers intellectually, but also to absorb them and apply their lessons in my daily life.

But unlike all the other dead philosophers in this book , addressing Henry David Thoreau did not require Eric to travel to some distant city. This brought him to the very place I am trying to return to more and more often this fall. So I'm going to Concord to try to follow in his footsteps and try to live the way he lived, as much as possible. I'm curious, when you first heard about Thoreau, what was your first thought of him? I did n't really like him. Um, I think you know, like most Americans, Thoreau was forced on me in high school.

I was 15 years old, I didn't really care, but to be honest, Thoreau and his most famous book, Walden, seemed a little annoying to me. I mean, this guy goes into the woods and is going to, you know, live simply. And I found it a bit instructive, like, "Oh, I'm not simple and noble enough for you, Henry David." So, to be honest , I didn't think much about him after graduation. But the philosopher who Eric found annoying and instructive, and who, as we are about to learn , was indeed very far from perfect, ended up changing the way Eric saw the world.

And I'm sure it can help make things a little more beautiful for you too. Our mind is constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our mind is wrong? What if our mind is lying to us, leading us away from what really makes us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can get us all back in the right direction . You are listening to "The Happiness Lab" with Dr. Lori Santos. So, give me something like a deep dive into Thoreau or something like "Thoreau 101." What is its essence?

" Thoreau 101". Okay, he was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, and spent almost his entire life there. I mean, he said he was made from the dust of Concord, you know, and he spent a few months in New York and met Walt Whitman, actually. And it must have been a cool meeting, but Thoreau didn't like New York. He wasn't a city man, he was a small town man. So he lived in Concord, went to Harvard, I think, mainly for the library privileges , because he loved books.

And he lived in a time of great change. The railroad was just arriving in Concord. Tensions that eventually led to the Civil War were escalating throughout the United States. So it was a stressful time, a time of transition. He was also at the forefront of this spiritual and philosophical movement called transcendentalism, which, in short, transcendentalists believed in the innate goodness of people. There is such a concept. And in the idea that the divine is not somewhere far away in the heavens, but right here, right in front of us, here and now.

And Thoreau and his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson were kind of the leaders of this movement. His most famous book is a book called "Walden." And it was kind of, his version of a personal experiment. So explain to me what Walden was about. So, in the 1840s, he had this idea that, you know, what if he went and lived simply, escaped society, went to live in the woods at Walden Pond. And it seems very modern in that sense, because, you know, you can imagine someone today saying, "I just need to get away from all this." Well, this is not a new concept.

I mean, even when the railroad was coming to town, when the economy was growing, with all these technological changes, the telegraph, etc., there was this feeling that you wanted to escape from it all . So, he took it to the next level, built a cabin on Walden Pond, and said, "Hey, I'm going to live there, live simply, grow my own vegetables, etc." There's an asterisk here, but at least that was the idea. Now about this little star. Thoreau, in fact, did not escape all this .

At least, not completely. The hut he built was small, simple, and completely devoid of indoor plumbing. But it was also only a mile and a half from downtown Concord. Henry's family lived nearby, and he visited them regularly. He even asked his mother to help him with the laundry. But, while Thoreau's popular image was of disappearing completely into the wild, complete isolation was not the goal of his experiment. So what was he trying to do? Live life consciously – that was his famous sentence. He wanted to live consciously and not wait until he died to realize or die that he had n't really lived at all.

So it was kind of an impulse, you know, what am I doing with my life in this mess? And one of the things he really wanted to do during this time, living simply and living far away , was to learn as much as possible. In the book you call Thoreau a collector of wisdom. What do you mean? He didn't care who said anything. He didn't care what they said. And this is not really our path . We tend to look at, you know, Kate Santos, she's at Yale, so I'm going to focus on her because of blah blah blah .

We tend to focus on the source of information rather than the information itself. Not on Thoreau. So we're talking, you know, about the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s , and he's not just reading ancient, like a lot of people, you know, the Stoics, the ancient Greeks and Romans. He also reads Confucius. And in his cabin, believe it or not, on Walden Pond, in the 1840s, he has a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. So this idea, you know, kind of like early Eastern mysticism, New Age philosophy, centuries before we actually think about it, it came to the forefront in America.

He simply picked up bits of wisdom from wherever he could, like a scavenger or a forager. So, the way you describe it now sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? You know, all these changes are happening. He's like, " I think it's good that I'm getting away from reality and, you know , reading the ancients, and reading this cool Eastern philosophy," but there's also some controversy about Thoreau. He was not considered the kind of person everyone loved. Is that true? No, they didn't like him at all .

In fact, in Concord he was simply considered an oddball, aloof. But, you know, as I say in my book, if we only focused on nice, likeable philosophers, we would have a very thin pamphlet about philosophy. Um, Nathaniel Hawthorne, his neighbor, and we say acquaintance, not friend, spoke of a certain iron, categorical determination towards Thoreau. Other people weren't so kind. They considered him somewhat selfish. Again , I say aloof, but I think the truth is that he was an introvert, and as you know, a lot of introverts can seem unfriendly when they're not really.

They just looked inside themselves. And I think it was Thoreau. I mean, he had this protruding nose, he had these piercing eyes that people, frankly, find scary. You know, he just looked at things for a long time with those eyes, and he had an almost superhuman sense of smell, and he could hear things that other people couldn't. So there was something strange about it. Eric's book tells stories of Thoreau taking one look at a tree and correctly estimating its height, or using his keen sense of the ground to spot Native American arrowheads buried in the ground.

Thoreau was extremely attuned to the world around him. He noticed things that other people simply missed. Eric believes we can all learn something from Thoreau's keen observation, and that by following his example, we can all begin to notice more of the good that is right in front of us. And Eric will share how to do it when The Happiness Lab returns in a moment. I talk to traveling philosopher Eric Weiner about his thoughts on Henry David Thoreau, a scholar I've been turning to again and again this fall in an attempt to reset my own focus.

To learn from long- dead philosophers for his book, Eric decided it was important to spend time in the places where they actually lived and worked. And for the philosopher I've been obsessed with lately, that meant exploring Thoreau's hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. I started at the Concord Library, which is a beautiful, amazing library, and they have a lot of original Thoreau manuscripts that are really cool to touch even through the laminated plastic, just to see his handwriting. And so I thought: what will this chapter be like?

As a writer, you are guided by preconceptions, and you just have to be open to changing those perceptions, but my preconceptions were, "Oh, this is going to be a chapter called 'How to Live Alone Like Thoreau, or How to Live Simply Like Thoreau,' because that's how we imagine him." So, I'm in the library, talking to the curator of rare manuscripts, a woman named Leslie Wilson, and I tell her my idea, and she says, no, no, no, no, it wasn't Thoreau. He talked about how to see.

And she said you need to read not only Walden, but his diaries as well ." And then I learn that diaries consist of about 2 million words. I haven't read them all, but I 've read a lot. And I realized what she meant by the word "see," that in fact the diaries were about his observations and this amazing ability to see things that other people couldn't see . So I changed the subject and called the chapter "How to See Like Thoreau." So in your book you talk about how Thoreau wasn't interested in the idea of ​​the nature of reality, which is of concern to many, you know, scientists and philosophers, but he was really interested in the reality of nature.

Talk about what this means and how it relates to the idea of vision. Right. So, he was not an empiricist. Empiricists believe that we are born a tabula rasa, a blank slate, with no pre- loaded software, and all our knowledge comes through our senses. So most empiricists, including Thoreau, are not really interested in metaphysics, in things that cannot be touched, tasted, heard, or smelled. Therefore, he was much more interested in what we can learn through our senses, rather than in pondering the nature of reality with our minds.

Do we really exist? These are the questions that some philosophers find fascinating . Not Thoreau. I mean, he said a famous saying: “Who can say what is? He can only say what he can see. ” And that was his philosophy, in a nutshell. And talk about how this philosophy also impacts the value of vision. Because, you know, part of it was about metaphysics, but part of it was about the value of connecting with reality in this really multifaceted sense , right? We tend to think of vision as a very peculiar mechanical process.

This vision is like a photograph, you know, our eye takes a picture of the screen I'm looking at right now, or my coffee cup, which is right here. Here she is. And then it just, you know, maybe reflects in our brains. And that's not how it works at all. I mean, scientists now know this . In fact, vision is much less like a photograph and much more like a conversation. So what I mean by that is what's happening is that my brain is having a conversation with itself.

There is actually something in the coffee cup I am looking at right now. It is cylindrical, it contains liquid. And you quickly search your database for something you may have seen before. And your brain is essentially telling you, "Oh, this is probably a coffee mug, and this is coffee, and you like coffee, so this is something delicious." And all this happens so instantly that we don't realize it. And I think Thoreau recognized this, that vision is something we do with our minds more than our eyes.

So it was kind of a whole body, whole mind vision. I think this idea of seeing the whole body, the whole mind is also related to this connection between vision and feelings, which Thoreau talked about a lot. He really got a lot of positive emotions from the vision. Right. So, even though he was a natural philosopher, what we would call a scientist today, and he had a very scientific mindset, he wasn't interested in what he called a view from nowhere. A view from nowhere—this is the concept of a scientist, who might also be a psychologist, who studies, oh, I don't know, maybe happiness, and, you know, I just study happiness.

I don't have any skin in this game, no dog in this hunt, you know, I'm just watching from above. Thoreau thought this was nonsense. That there is no view from above. This look was empty and cold, and he didn't have time for it. So he was very passionate about this idea of ​​vision as something subjective, coming from the heart as much as from the head or the eye. The things that matter most to us, like happiness and love, are actually the most subjective. So Thoreau was a big believer in valuing the subjective, that, you know, from the right perspective we can see beauty and feel beauty, I think that would be a key word almost anywhere.

And part of the value that we get from the subjective is a particular kind of emotion that I think Thoreau really delved into, which is the idea of ​​wonder. In the book you talk about how you can't read Thoreau without seeing him as some kind of enthralled teenager. Give me some examples of this. There's this great scene where he just stares at something for hours , and this farmer, you know, looks at him and says, "What is he doing?" He walks away and then comes back about 5 hours later and he's still there.

Thoreau is still there, in the same place, on the pond, or wherever he was, and the farmer just asks, “What are you doing? "And he says, 'Mr. So-and- so, I'm studying the habits of the bullfrog.'" And the farmer just says, " Oh, God, do you understand?" "But kids, God, that's the thing. You know, adults were wary of Thoreau, but kids could spend the whole day with him , watching a duck hatch eggs, for example. Because children have this sense of wonder. You know, they say that a philosopher is a 7-year-old child, only with a bigger brain.

And Thoreau embodied it. He had the wonder of a child, a seven-year-old child, but the mind of a naturalist who knew birds, knew science, and knew the Bhagavad Gita. So seeing a lot, and I quote, is better—it's not about doing more, but doing less and getting rid of habits that have simply layered on us, like scaly skin that we have to shed. So Thoreau, in essence, never grew up. There are many scientific papers that demonstrate the power of play. If we get curious, we can play around with ideas or really pay attention playfully, as opposed to trying to do something specific.

And that seems to be another kind of thing that Thoreau seemed to embody, the playfulness of vision. It was definitely not work for him. It was fun. And I think the key word, and this applies, I think, to both happiness and vision, is expectation. I think expectations are the enemy of happiness, and I think they are also the enemy of vision. Thoreau certainly believed that when you decide in advance what you will see, you don't actually see it. So you need to slow down this process.

I mentioned earlier that a vision is more like a conversation, but it is a conversation that we have very quickly. And, you know, it usually serves us really well, if it took me half an hour to realize that this is a coffee cup in front of me , my coffee will have cooled by then, and that's not so cool. But sometimes that doesn't serve us because we've decided in advance that we know what we're going to see before we even see it. We know what it is, and as a scientist, you know, it can also be confusing to you that nine times out of ten it's always been a coffee cup, so this time it must be a coffee cup.

And Thoreau did not make this mistake. He saw everything as if he were seeing it for the first time. And I think that's a really powerful concept of happiness in general, don't you think? I think seeing something as if you're seeing it for the first time can give you all these positive emotions. This may pique your curiosity. This may make you feel awestruck . But I think that kind of flexibility with everyday objects is really good practice for more complex things, right? You know, when a difficult situation arises, I can see it as a challenge, or as an opportunity, right?

This contributes in some way to this interesting flexibility. Right. So I think you mean altered perspective, and that's what Thoreau was talking about. So we're talking about vision, and it might sound very superficial, always looking at things, but no, it's changing your perspective, and I think you're absolutely right that in order to change your perspective on the big things in life. I mean big things like a cancer diagnosis, the loss of a loved one, getting fired from a job. You know, in order to change your perspective on these big things, the way to build that strength, I think, is to change your perspective on the little things.

To see how you know the beauty in your coffee cup, the way the water rustles around you, to look at the same stack of books in your office that has been there every day and see it a little differently. By the way, that's why I travel. My favorite quote about travel is from author Henry Miller, who said that a destination is never a place, but a new way of looking at things. And I think most people travel not just for pleasure, for hedonistic reasons. It's about finding this new perspective on things.

You can play this trick at home. You can pretend to be a tourist in your hometown. Just walk around as if you're seeing it for the first time. And you know, it takes effort at first , but you can do it. So practicing a new perspective on the little things can help us develop the flexibility we need to get through life's toughest moments. Eric has already shared several ways to do this. Slow down, let go of expectations, and try to see the world through the eyes of a tourist .

But how can we do this more often in our busy lives? How can we become more present if we don't have hours to sit in the woods watching frogs and ducks? Eric will share his advice on how to follow Thoreau in modern times when The Happiness Laboratory returns from its hiatus. Author Eric Weiner believes that Henry David Thoreau, a philosopher he once found rather unpleasant, can teach us to see the little things around us with a fresh eye. And thus can make life new and beautiful again.

I asked Eric to tell me about one of Thoreau's favorite ways to change his perspective. Long walks, or as Thoreau famously called them, walks. He never walked, he strolled. It was his favorite word. And if you think about it, it's different. Walking, you know, sounds like it's necessary for health or has some purpose to get somewhere. Walking, I think, implies a certain playfulness, but also aimlessness, a lack of expectations. So every morning he would do his morning pages, simply writing down his thoughts for the day.

And in the afternoon he would go for a walk and walk four, five, six miles a day without any problems. Sorry, I said " walk". He wandered. And as you probably know, walking has all sorts of health and psychological benefits, and I think one of them is that we can see better. You know, not sitting still and looking at something, but looking at it while walking, because a large part of your brain is occupied with the task of walking, and freed up enough, I think you can see more things.

So he saw a lot as he wandered. In fact, he even has one expression where he talked about the wandering eye, which I think is a great expression. This idea is just like looking around, you know, not looking for anything in particular, seeing as you wander. He talked a lot about this idea that we are all lazy visionaries , and that we need to see more slowly. What do you mean by this idea of ​​seeing more slowly? It means slowing down that assumption that you make about something, like even what you're looking at.

It is the ability to remain in a state of ignorance. Now we're starting to philosophize, you know, and it's an uncomfortable state. That's why we always strive for certainty . That's why we put people in boxes. Part of the reason, I think, is that this country is so divided is because certainty is more comfortable. Henry David Thoreau felt more comfortable in conditions of uncertainty. Or, let's put it this way, he was able to tolerate this uncertainty. And yes , he did it with vision, but I think he did it with everything in his life.

He was working on it. I mean , he looked at Walden Pond from different perspectives . He looked at it day, night, on the boat on the surface, underwater. He even turned his head and looked between his legs at the upside- down pond. And is this something you tried yourself when you went to Walden Pond ? I tried. I found a place where there were no tourists, turned my head upside down, and looked at Walden Pond. And I have to say, the blood rushed to my head and I thought I was going to faint, but it didn't quite work out the way I had hoped.

But I think Henry David Thoreau would say, “Okay, you don’t have to do it that way . You don't need to go crazy turning the pot upside down." By the way, his real name was not Henry David Thoreau, but David Henry Thoreau. He even changed his name. I think one of the reasons he likes the upside-down versions so much is the idea of ​​not jumping to conclusions, the idea of ​​not looking for flaws. I think it also makes a big difference to happiness if you can broaden your perspective on things, right?

Yes, there's a great line he says: "He who looks for faults will find faults even in paradise." And I think that's very true. And maybe you've met such people. Or they're on vacation and you think, "Wow, that's great." But, you know, they just complain that the food is bad, or it's cloudy today, whatever . But we tend to separate beauty and everything that is the opposite of beauty in our culture. We isolate beauty in museums or concert halls, and then we say to ourselves, "Okay, now I'm going to, you know, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and I'm going to experience beauty." And now, you know, I'm going to walk down Third Avenue, take the subway, and experience the opposite beauty.

But in reality, you can find more beauty in the subway and less in the Museum of Modern Art. So, this is the idea of ​​being open to the beauty in the trash. And yes, if you look for flaws, you will find them. And so, in your process of trying to get to know Thoreau, you know, you started by saying that he seemed very special and not very relatable. Did you eventually think that he was the person you should follow more if you want to learn to see?

I mean, I fell in love with him, but I started to appreciate him. And perhaps with these philosophers, that's all we can hope for. I'll just give you one example. You know, a few months after I was in Concord, Massachusetts, I'm living in Washington, DC . I was walking down the street and dropped my cell phone. And, of course , he fell screen-side down . And of course it broke into a million pieces and I was in shock because my life was there and I tried to text my wife to tell her what happened but I was texting her from a broken phone and I'm bleeding now because I cut myself.

I just stopped and, you know, just looked at my phone. And I don't know if you've ever broken your phone, but sometimes it can create really beautiful drawings, these patterns and shapes . And for a moment, you know, just a moment, I thought, "Wow, this is great, this broken phone." And I think that, um, Thoreau probably would n't have had a cell phone, I'm not sure. Um, he would definitely have a low- traffic plan. He wouldn't have an unlimited plan, but I think if he had a phone with a low data plan and dropped it, he would also find beauty in a broken phone.

So, that's just one example of how Thoreau has stayed with me. So let's talk about what we can all learn from this idea of trying to see a little better. If you were going to give some advice on strategies that people can employ to try to be less lazy about seeing, what would you suggest ? Okay, the first thing I would say is to change your idea of ​​what seeing is, just get rid of this idea that it's a photograph. It's much more interactive. You know, Thoreau would even say that when he looks at an apple, it's like he's collaborating with it.

You know, if he looks at the apple, the apple looks at him. It sounds a little crazy, but many artists will tell you something similar. When they draw something and look at it, it's a collaborative process in a way. So I think one thing is to try to think of vision as something less like you're just taking from the world around you, but how you're collaborating with the world. And I like this idea because it really shows another thing that we can do with our senses, right?

Namely, that we can actually implement our own preferences. We actually have some control over the preferences we bring to our vision. We might look for flaws, and that might be our natural course of action, but when we start looking for beauty, when we start looking for pleasure, we can often find it in strange places. And that's kind of part of the collaboration, right? If you say, "Hey Apple, I want to look at you differently," you respond, "Oh, you're actually a lot redder than I thought." Either this shape looks pretty neat or the phone is broken, I can find some benefits in even looking at these things.

It's a kind of process of using your senses to find benefit, so to speak. Yes, and what you see for the first time is not the final solution. This vision is a much more fluid process. I mean, think about how maybe you've changed your attitude towards certain places or works of art. Take, for example, Thoreau in Walden. I wasn't interested when I was 15. At 50, you know, I thought, "Hey, this is actually pretty good." Well, the book has n't changed. The words are all the same.

So one thing you can do is kind of put aside this idea of ​​seeing it as something just binary, 01. You know, it's much more than that. Another option is to simply focus on the vision. So Thoreau's advice was to keep all other senses quiet , focusing on one. Now it can work by simply closing your eyes to hear something. We do it naturally. Or to smell something . But it also means blocking out sound when you're trying to see. Focus on this one feeling. The most important piece of advice, in my opinion, is to slow down.

Just take the time and really see. I met there with a few Torovians, as they are called. And they said, "Do you know where I can go and experience this vision?" And one guy, a real ardent Torovian, said: "You know, you don't need to go to nature." Because, I admit, I'm not that big a nature lover. Nature is what I feel between an air- conditioned house and an air-conditioned car, okay? He said, "You know, you can go to Starbucks and do your little experiment there." So I went to Starbucks in Concord, which of course is done in the old style, you know, everything in this town is so cute and perfect.

I spent 5 hours in Starbucks just observing. You can easily do it, spend 5 hours there. But people will start looking at you strangely at some point. What cool things have you seen at Starbucks? I'm curious what turned out. First of all , I only hear what I used to hear at NPR, so I'm very tuned in to my hearing. And I'm like, "Oh, that would be such a beautiful sound, that whistling of an espresso machine." I was something of an anthropologist and I watched people standing, for example, at a little milk and sugar station where people go to get a drink, and how people come and go and kind of dance with each other .

There was such a protocol, but not everyone was sure of it. "Oh, have I been standing here too long ?" And something like that. It was as if recreated in my imagination and quite beautiful. So you don't have to go to the Grand Canyon or the Louvre to see beauty. This is exactly the concept of beauty in everyday life that Thoreau has to teach us. And waiting, you know, along with slowing down, means giving up expectations. And when you start doing this with physical objects, I think you open the door to being able to do this with your thought processes.

You know, it's called the happiness laboratory. And coming back to that, um, vision and happiness are actually closely related. A flexible seer becomes a flexible thinker, becomes a happier person. Well, I am enjoying my visits to Walden Pond this fall. I really like Eric's reminder that we don't have to travel somewhere new or spend hours staring up at the world to see things a little differently. We can practice wherever we are, simply by taking a moment to notice the tiny beautiful things around us, to find something extraordinary in the ordinary.

And maybe, like Eric and his broken phone, we'll start to find a little more wonder in places we never thought possible. You can read more about Eric's adventures with Thoreau and other philosophers he tried to learn from in his book, The Socrates Express in Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers. And that brings us to the end of our fall book series, but don't worry, because next week we'll start something a little different. I'll share some of my favorite live conversations from the past year .

Shows that I recorded with some of my best friends and the people I admire most when it comes to the science of happiness. More about this next time in the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Lori Santos.

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