On joy and enjoyment

One of my great achievements in my opinion has been to build a life where I prioritize building joy for myself. As I have gained age, I have realised that joy is delicate and so ephemeral that it is so easy to just forget about it, to push it to tomorrow. And for that I am proud of the young adult me, who was able to plan, prioritise and build for joy.

I am sure it wasn’t easy for 20 something me, to first identify what brings me joy and then pursue it. We all know that in the Eisenhower matrix, its hardest to go after the important but not urgent things. And joy is never urgent. Especially in the way we grow up, we are told to delay it. “There will be time for the frivolous later”. I am glad I didn’t go down that route. I was able to understand that what I do matters to me, doing things with my hand and with my mind matters to me. That I don’t need to have only one kind of “career” and that I could allow myself the freedom to pursue whatever I wanted. Tough calls i took almost a decade and a half ago, and stuck through, because it builds joy.

Though like most things that you build systems for, and after running the systems for a while you realise that it needs some adjustment and iteration, lately I’ve been looking at what I have optimised out of. I hate realised the lens that I was looking at things from, has been so macro, that while I will always say I love my life, and I really do, I am not sure if I savour it. I think I have trained myself out of the way one sits and enjoys things, quietly with focus not on finishing, creating, or even doing. But just on being.

Like sitting on the side of an ocean and feeling the salty wind on your face. With no desire to be anywhere else, or for anything to change, even though everything around you changes. The waves come and go, crashing sometimes a little closer and sometimes a little further, and your only anticipation is if this time it will touch your toes or wouldn’t.

I don’t really know how one goes about it. How to get to enjoyment from moment to moment. I am always an excited enthusiastic happy person. But there is nuance here. I am excited and engaged but not a calmly stable person. Motivated and never really content. Not to say that I want to keep achieving more, but I definitely want to keep doing more.

Honestly I had written a far more reasonable piece for this month but somehow it felt less honest, and too “logical” so I have written this. This which I am not sure means anything to anyone other than me. But I guess I am learning to let myself be, and not tie myself up in a straitjacket (as my therapist put it). Maybe this resonates with one or more people.