Sunday, September 6, 2009

A Good Place: “Enjoying What You Have To Do”

Most people wonder how to have a fulfilling, satisfying life. They might dream about, and chase, the elusive life of riches or relative fame, always potentially missing what is right under their noses. The thing of real fulfilment—right now—is enjoying the thing you must do. That is, choosing to enjoy it by finding the joy of “doing” in that everyday thing.

When we’re honest with ourselves we’re far more interested and adept at wasting time on the things we find pleasure in but that don’t deliver much, if any, value to our or others’ lives. There’s a hint of escapism in this. The game time. The television time. The window shopping time. The time spent talking about nothing issues either at work or during non-work time. This list is not exhaustive.

Procrastination is the name of this basic game and it only serves to further frustrate us at levels of our consciousness we’re hardly even aware of.

It’s like an “irreconcilable difference” we have within ourselves. And we’re determined to never admit to it, or if we do we often don’t have the resolve to make it right.

Well, that’s the problem, what about the solution?

Harry S. Truman once said, “I found that the men and women who got to the top were those who did the jobs they had at hand, with everything they had of energy and enthusiasm and hard work.”

It seems so simple.

The truth is it takes several months to several years to form positive life-giving habits from the backdrop of these habits of procrastination—but we have to start somewhere. And if we start and continue we will surely get there!

When we consider that all along all we need, really, is to redefine what we’re about and then learn to enjoy it, the indifference we feel is resolvable. Suddenly life makes more sense.

I’ve said before, one of the most pleasurable activities can be washing dishes or ironing. We can get a buzz from ticking good items off the list. These activities, like homework when we were at school, once done, give us options at “time off” where we earn time to do what we really enjoy.

It doesn’t get any more complicated that choice. Making the choice to do the thing that needs doing before we consider the nice thing to do creates in us power—true power over ourselves.

Suddenly we grasp for the first time the front door and ignition keys of our lives.

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