“To Enjoy”

The joy is in the doing, not in having done.

There are things we need to do in life. There are chores and tasks which we must have completed in order to function in a pleasant state where those things are finished. I don’t necessarily want to do laundry, but I do want clean clothes. It’s fine to operate that way when it comes to those things. Sure, if laundry really made you miserable you should outsource it, but it’s fine to just “get done” those kinds of tasks with neither misery nor mirth.

But as our lives become full of those things, sometimes we get overly ambitious about the things we want to do and we over-commit. When that happens, we can turn our hobbies, joys, and pastimes into a mirthless “to-do” list, too! Suddenly we’re not eagerly anticipating our next vacation, but we’re treating it as just one more thing to “have done” so we can live in the state afterward.

Avoid this trap! If you have a huge list of those things, joys you’re trying to mechanically power through, scrap it. Take your top two or three and enjoy them, instead of just “doing” all of them.

If something makes you happy, you don’t want to be done with it. So if you find yourself yearning for that state, stop and ask yourself if you really need to do it at all.