The Treasure of Life to Enjoy

What does it mean to enjoy? Let’s get right to it. Is it just a matter of having a “Good Time”? Is that what this about? Have fun? Take it easy. It’s a no brainer. Enjoy yourself. End of story. Why make it complicated?

Most people would probably recommend that you relax, take a deep breath and enjoy doing whatever you do. Enjoy a show. Enjoy theme parks. Enjoy eroticism and angry comedy. Enjoy texting, surfing, skiing and skipping. Lift weights. Get religious. Eat protein supplements. Water slide. Run on or off treadmills. Get a dog—carry a bag for poo.

Shop.

Adopt a highway. Go Buddhist. Do yoga. Go churchy. Take classes in mindfulness and meditation. Play video games. Fight death. Enjoy the pure satisfaction of a lush green lawn from fertilizer. Doesn’t matter what you enjoy as long as you keep busy—so goes society’s mass mentality.

Jump from airplanes (with parachute and/or helmet). Climb mountains. “Follow your dreams.” Doesn’t matter what you do—as long as you do something.

Industries are dedicated to providing the highest quality products and services for you to enjoy. If you work hard enjoyment is. “Easy peasy!” as they say.

Peas be with you.

Put on a Life is Good® t-shirt and jiggle as you walk to “I Love to Boogie” by T-Rex. (Note: Life is Good® is a registered trademark). Doesn’t matter if people find you irritating. Who cares? Smile to spite them. Stay positive. Ignore negativity.

Maybe all you need is a six-pack of Pabst Blue ribbon, a fishing rod and a beautiful day. Or, if you’re a real man’s man, all you need is an outlet mall and a blow-out sale on fashion and accessories. Wear humour like a life preserver. Be quick with a smile and say, “Have a stupendous day! Wipe those tears away!

“Keep it simple,” as they say—whoever they are.

If you’re a woman, maybe all you need is a mythically comfortable bra and to dance with abandon with Mr Right.

Mr Right?

Or, if you’re not of a stereotypical gender or race, maybe all you need is a big screen TV, some snacks and the latest episode of the Big Bang Theory or The Walking Dead.

There are any number of enjoyable things to do on (or off) this planet. But if enjoyment is easy, why are so many people unhappy? Is it political, geological, psychological, situational or economic? Even people who say they’re happy might just be busy.

Busy is often mistaken for happy.

On TV in his Unnatural Act (1991), comedian Jim Carey wondered, “Imagine if you could just be that happy? That would be powerful man. People would be tunneling under the street to avoid you.”

Life is bitter sweet. “Trying to make ends meet, you’re a slave to money and then you die—” so sang The Verve. Maybe that’s why, as Chris Rock observed, “People love to get high!” (“Getting High”).

Richard Pryor by Devonne Amos.

Transcending is a craving. Look at the fun such greats as Lenny Bruce, Mitch Hedberg, River Phoenix, and Philip Seymour Hoffman had on their way to the pleasure dome  of “Kubla Khan”.

But it’s all fun and games until someone starts on fire (or dies). Drugs are slippery. What goes up must come down—sometimes hard.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the philosopher (not the tiger) said that life is, “nasty, brutish and short” (Leviathan, 1610). He had a low opinion of humans. To him we’re all selfish and driven by a fear of death and a desire for personal gain. Only the rule of law keeps us in check” (source).

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson.

A biologist might say that life is an arrangement of molecules of self-sustenance and self-replication. Life is self-organising chemistry reproducing and passing characteristics via DNA, but this definition puts humans in with the amoeba.

Science bases life on externals but knowing life means knowing it from within. Life is either a meaningless accident operating in a meaningless universe, or it’s a planned experiment with future unknown. If the universe has any purpose, it is to explore what will happen.

Many physicists believe that the universe is only information and life is a process of energy being transformed—so is non-life, but the difference is that life is linked to the story it contains. Non-life is indifferent to stories imposed.

In Human Givens (2003) Ivan Tyrrell and Joe Griffin said that we are born with needs that seek satisfaction. When enough physical and emotional needs are met, an individual will enjoy life.

But a meaningful life becomes impossible if physical and emotional needs are insufficient and unfortunately, modern society seeks meaning through materialism which leaves us dissatisfied because of our biology. We can’t seem to find meaning. The result is ill mental health at a societal level.

Many people will never experience the satisfaction of a meaningful life. So, what’s the answer?

Look to nature.

Life is an unbroken flow of rippling simultaneous events. The sheer Scale of the Universe is as mind boggling as human ignorance. This world is beautiful. Animal life and the life of vegetation shows us that life is a matter of being. By means of a modest routine of eating, sleeping and reproducing, animals and vegetation balance their days doing what their bodies ask of them.

Life is simply a beautiful and harmonious borrowing of energy.

Humans lose the power to simply be happy eating, sleeping and reproducing because we believe we need a reason to be alive—a purpose and a goal to reach. On our deathbeds (something we have been made to fear) we want to be able to look back and tell ourselves that we have done something.

Life loses its purpose when we try to give it one. We are each no more significant than the sand by the sea or the clouds in the sky.

No more significant but not insignificant.

Whatever your race, religion or gender, when you step outside your door in the morning and feel the morning sun on your face and the fresh air in your lungs, close your eyes and smile. In that moment you feel life as it should be. No defining. No understanding. No thinking. Just that good feeling of bliss.

Hear violins in birds singing. Sing Chaplin’s, “This Is My Song” in your heart to yourself in the voice of Petula Clark. Feel unbridled love and enjoyment as you feel the significance of your own existence and everyone else’s.

This is you! This is you! This is you! Ignore advertising and look around! This is what life is.

Enjoy it.

The Art Of Enjoying

Here we go. There’s only one thing to do. You know what it is. You know what you want.

Don’t you?

What is the one thing you want? What element is missing? Say the first thing that comes to mind.

Is it money? love? leisure? comfort? freedom? a good job? better health? a better attitude? a friend? a new car? a martini? drugs? travel? a new house? nicer clothes? a cabin in the woods? good sex? Is it peace? a family? beauty? Is it wisdom? good food? excitement? adventure? contentment?

What is it?

Life is epitomized by two questions:

1) What do you do when you feel too much?

2) What do you do when you feel too little?

In 1975 Diana Ross sang the questions most of us ask ourselves at least once, “Do you know where you’re going to? Do you like the things that life is showing you? Where are you going to, do you know? Do you get what you’re hoping for? (“Theme from Mahogany”).

Do you know what you want?

When you lay down your sweet head, how do you know you haven’t just “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” like Freddy Fender?

Kathy Caprino, a women’s coach of success (not failure), wrote that of all things professional women (as opposed to amateur) say they want, the #1 mentioned missing element is… Happiness.  

Caprino writes, “Happiness continually escapes them because, first, they don’t really understand exactly what will make them happy. They just don’t know themselves well at all. Secondly, they search outside themselves for happiness – in a job, a husband, a family, a title, a paycheck, a fancy house. As a result, Happiness is constantly out of their control and a perpetual moving target that never stands still long enough for them to grasp.”

“I’m not saying that these things don’t bring happiness – of course, they can. The key point is that if everything you’re searching for remains outside of you, you’ll always be scrambling and chasing” (source).

We’re told that the biggest challenge is to know what we want, but that’s like the line from Pink Floyd, “If you don’t eat your meat” (if you don’t know what you want), “you can’t have any pudding” (you can’t be happy). (“Another Brick In The Wall“)

It’s a vicious circle. You have to know what you want to get it and if you don’t, you’re told, “Want harder! Dream bigger!” It leaves you somewhere between a rock (wanting) and a hard place (getting).

Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing (1919-2013) wrote, “Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me” (The Golden Notebook, 1962).

Aviator and author, Ann Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001) spoke of surrendering to one person in conversation, “It is not restful, it is not possible to talk wholeheartedly to more than one person at a time. You can’t really talk with a person unless you surrender to them…“

Cheap Trick sang of surrender, “Mommy’s all right. Daddy’s all right. They just seem a little weird. Surrender. Surrender. But don’t give yourself away. Hey, heeeeeey.” Sarah McLachlan sang of surrender too, but hers was sweet and all she had to give (“Sweet Surrender“).

The art of enjoyment is to surrender to what is and waste time freely.

News today is gone tomorrow. Resist what is and happiness eludes. Wishing something different smothers enjoyment. Wanting comes up with a plan and getting is a die cast. It’s like the Zen story of the old man who falls in a river and is taken over a waterfall.

Onlookers fear for his life but the old man comes out unharmed. Asked how he survived he says, “I accommodated myself to the water, not the water to me. Without thinking, I allowed myself to be shaped by it. Plunging into the swirl, I came out with the swirl. This is how I survived” (source).

Enjoyment is a flowing kindness. If thoughts are demanding, listen without acting because thoughts can trick you into believing it’s your self wanting the best for you (see: “It’s not me”).

To be with reality without wanting is to enjoy peace like Otis Redding. “So I’m just gonna sit on the dock of the bay. Watching the tide roll away. Ooo, I’m sittin’ on the dock of the bay. Wastin’ time.“

People flounder for meaning, but as Charlie Chaplin said, “What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning” (My Life in Pictures, 1974). Whatever you do wastes time. The trick is to waste time with abandon.

Be easy with what is and accept change as enjoyment.

See: It’s A Wonderful Life scene

If life is a desire you can’t help, stop expecting. It leaves you open for disappointment. You might even wish you’d never been born like George Bailey in the movie It’s A Wonderful Life. 

Speaking of which, the philosopher David Benatar argues in Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence that a hypothetical person’s non-existence is better than an actual person’s (source).

Benatar hears a “Baby Elephant Walk” and lays it out thus:

1) If a person exists, pain is bad.
2) If a person exists, pleasure is good.
3) A non-existing person has an absence of pain (that’s good).
4) A non-existing person has an absence of pleasure (not bad).

To Benatar there’s an asymmetry in favour of nonexistence:

But if Benatar didn’t exist, how could he muse on this? Nonexistence is not an experience. Would Frankenstein rather not live because of pain in his thumb? If the blind man didn’t exist, how could he enjoy a cigar?

Benatar could learn from Frankenstein and Helen Keller (1880-1968) who wrote: “Everything has its wonders even darkness and silence, and I learn whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.”

If you’re made of corpses or are deaf and blind, at least by existing you experience something! If you can read this, you’ve been procreated. Enjoy it! The art of enjoyment includes singing Saba Lou’s song, “Early to bed. Early to rise. Picking my nose. Wasting my time. These are my good habits. These are my bad habits. But I never stop feelin’ fine” (“Good Habits (and bad)“).

Enjoy any given day (even a bad one). Take a deep breath. What have you got to lose?

Enjoy A Bad Day

The Country Dance by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684 – 1721). Bring it on.

Bad days come and go. That is all there is to know. Life is up and down, ebb and flow. In the mashed potato dance of life you know it’s not all good, but do you know how to enjoy a bad day? Do you know how to make a bad day bearable?

A bad day made bearable.

First, picture good and bad days as positive and negative polarities in a single process like a magnet. If you cut off the negative polarity on a magnet, a new negative polarity appears. You can’t get rid of a bad day. If you expect only good, you’ll be disappointed.

The trick is to enjoy all the nuances of life (bad days too) and put your philosophical pedal to the metal.

Rock on. Bang a gong (get it on).

In The Way of Myth Joe Campbell refers to a saying, “Joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.” Life isn’t meant to be happy. That’s not what it’s about. It isn’t about lifestyle choices, convenience and a good golf score. Sorrow is the essence of life. Get into it. That’s what myths are about. A myth asks, “Are you affirmative enough with your relationship to say, Yes! – no matter what?”

Life’s a killer. It’s true. Your body will die. Enjoyment is the ability to absorb the horror of that truth. The question is, “Will your love absorb it?”

Go spiritual. Thoughts immaterial. Soul Man. Rock on.

Chaplin on a bad day in 1916. Bring it on.

Charlie Chaplin said, “Life is a tragedy when seen close-up, but a comedy in long shot.” Unhappy people want the world to be other than it is. Let a bad day be, smile, slam your heart on the table and say, Bring it on.  You can say, This too shall pass! Condition temporary. The world isn’t a problem. Turn your gaze inward and look where you’re looking from. Enjoy your vantage point.

The you that’s looking is the same as it’s been since day one. A 100 year old man feels the same as he did at 15. Forget age. Forget knowledge. Get to the source of it all.

Go graceful. You can dance if you want to.

Forget criticism. Expect nothing. Go blank. Be an idiot. That should be easy. Forget that you’re a third person thing called I, me, and mine. With awareness, imagine reversing your gaze. Look at the looker looking. Look from the source. Give your face away. You don’t own it anyway.

Enjoy a bad day at sea.

Dance to the art of noise. Walk a beat without swinging your arms. Look out the sides of your eyes. What you see is relative to where you are.

Dualists  say that it’s mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. They say the mind is a non-physical thing so put on a sweater and let intellectual powers override threats, problems and difficulties.

Monists say that a whole variety of things could be explained as a single substance or a single thing that we call “the universe.”

Scientists say that every living thing is made of cells which are protein based robots too small to feel anything. Cells have the properties of life but no part of them is alive.

In the short video What is life? a narrator asks, “If everything in the universe is made of the same stuff, does this mean that everything in the universe is dead or that everything in the universe is alive? That it’s just a question of complexity? Does this mean we can never die because we were never alive in the fist place? Is life and death an irrelevant question and we haven’t noticed it yet? Are we much more a part of the universe than we thought?” (kurzgesagt).

The Flaming Lips (the band that is) made a free-wheeling song about escaping into dreams on bad days. The chorus goes, “And all your bad days will end. You have to sleep late when you can. And all your bad days will end” (Bad Days). In the video they enjoy an old motel, summer, watermelons and a couple of kids enjoy riding their bikes.

And there it is. It’s as simple as that. Look at the world like a kid. Have no idea. Enjoy.

17th century consciousness.

Enjoyment isn’t about money or achievement. You don’t need to be smart, strong or even slightly good looking. To enjoy reality, all of it – bad days too! – cleaning teeth and toilets, waiting in lines, getting cancer, losing everything, giving, taking, the whole damn thing! – through it all, whatever happens, let it. Do what you can. Be just and live in heartfelt awareness. Tune your senses to the frequency of the moment like a Nacho Libre Religious man singing, “I am I am!”

Unfettered by fury or despair, open to experience, where death is nothing, the future a concept and compassion a reality, therein find sublime enjoyment. There, like a non-violent pirate say, “Arr! Man, she be good!” You say without fear like a llama going over the falls, “Bring it on.“

You don’t have to be successful. Just be behind your eyes. Look outward and inward at the same time. Measure success by awareness and an ability to enjoy what comes along – no matter what!

References

Boa, F. (1994). The Way of Myth: Talking With Joseph Campbell. Shambhala Pocket Classics.

Harding, D. E. (2000). Face to No-Face: Rediscovering Our Original Nature. D. Lang (Ed.). Carlsbad, CA.

Simple Enjoyment

Sad to say that some people – every now and then, sometimes, on occasion, not infrequently – are observed missing opportunities for simple enjoyment: the kind where it feels good to be alive, the kind where one has the leisure to stand and stare as long as sheep or cows without a world too much with us (see Davies & Wordsworth).

Such missed moments of simple enjoyment are akin to waking up with a start on the street suddenly aware of yourself in your skin, in your surroundings with the song across the universe playing in your mind. You suddenly realize there are no problems probleming you. SMACK! You’ve been sleepwalking in a reality forgot.

It’s simple. It’s enjoyment.

You look at your hand for the first time like you’re Timothy Leary on a psychedelic trip. You become aware of the world that’s been staring you in the face, but you were too preoccupied with the state of the economy, your finances, an argument, over-population and your uncomfortably tight under-pants.

With awareness of simple enjoyment, you feel freedom. You see humour in calamity. You see raindrops in puddles rippling outward for no reason. You hear a distant train haunting and birds on branches.

“Caa, caa, caa.”

Simple enjoyment is the feeling of a Norwegian wood. It’s a shift. Your face goes slack. Nasal passages open. You become Emerson’s transparent eyeball: merry, glad, cheerful, without thought, carefree.

R. Waldo Emerson as he looked in 1846.

“In the woods…. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes)… Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all” (Nature, 1836)

Simple enjoyment of the non-technological and pharmaceutical kind is rarely sought and seldom found.

The philosophy of enjoyment is a reminder of what you know. Give yourself a shake. Slap your cheek gently. Throw cold water.

Step one: Go for a walk.
Step two: Look around.
Step three: Smell the air (avoid the poo).

Take a breather.

Even in the midst of chaos simple enjoyment is near. Don’t go anywhere.

It’s here.

Let human activity pass you by unheralded.

Waste time by appreciating its passage. The world, she goes round and round. Hum to yourself, “Go and do what you want. I know you have the need. You’ll never make me cry“. Why? Because.

At some level you probably agree with the idea of simple enjoyment (stop what you’re doing, look around, enjoy), but actually doing it – capturing a moment of contentment – is another thing. It’s a waiting game and the immediate looms large.

Things up close (jobs, problems, temptations) appear larger than they are. It’s an illusion. The future disappears in immediate desires. The temptation to do what you’ve always done (not enjoy) predicts the future. But, if you bundle temptations (purchases, sex, booze, cake, drugs, computer games…) with the simple desire to be who you want to be in the future, you have a chance.

Time lingered on something small like a seashell, a rock, a leaf, can take you out of yourself so you enjoy serenity now!

Moments of simple enjoyment are subtle. Ethereal. Like Elmer Fudd said, “Be vewy, vewy quiet.”

Try this: When walking somewhere, stop. Freeze.

Remain motionless until you giggle. Let only your eyes move. Such moments so-lingered are well-remembered. Even if Don Rickels – Mr. Warmth himself – were to mock you, you would laugh. Insults are nothing when enjoying.

In a song for his little boy, John Lennon sang: “Before you cross the street take my hand. Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” (Beautiful Boy, 1980).

It’s now a slogan, but do these lines strike a chord, or is it a rationalization for the unprepared?

Charlie Chaplin said something that’s become a minor slogan: “We think too much and feel too little” (The Great Dictator, 1940). Ask not, what you think, ask, what you feel. Emotions decide before we realize.

Ask: What is the meaning of life? How should I live a good life? – not in terms of knowledge, but in terms of wisdom.

Provide yourself with the leisure-time of at minimum, a minute or two, to notice with senses attuned.

Look around and enjoy without demand.

Tell someone about a beautiful moment of simple enjoyment you’ve had so as to re-live it and help someone else live it too. Simple enjoyment can save yourself and, in so doing, save your world.

The Art of Day-dreaming

The Philosophy of Enjoyment combines the sensibilities of a Walt Whitman or Leonard Cohen – poetical – with a Charlie Chaplin or Jerry Seinfeld – comical. The basic idea is to experience life sensuously (like a poet) and lightly (like a comic). Life and enjoyment are synonymous, but just because you’re alive doesn’t mean you’re enjoying it. For some people death isn’t hard: life is.

But if you practice the art of day-dreaming, even when life is hard, it’s still enjoyable. With a poet-comic sensibility, you can have ecstatic moments without having to do anything but relax, observe and chill. It’s a matter of practicing a few mental tricks.

The first trick is to focus on your senses. This goes back to earlier posts like “Getting Small: Concentrate” and “The Will To Enjoy: How to be more conscious“. Stop what you’re doing and ask yourself: What am I seeing? What’s that smell? (Is it me?) What am I hearing? tasting? touching?

Look from the periphery of your eyes. Go discreetly into a zone where you meet your surroundings. Beyond everything that you think you are, you’re still just a sensuous organic unit. People get a false sense of superiority. They let their senses get dull through lack of attention. Life becomes an abstract affair.

Look to the animals

Watch the way a dog or a cat sniffs the air (ignore how they sniff each other). Watch their ears. Watch the way a sparrow looks around and listens. Compare that to how people stare straight ahead or at electronic devices.Go outside or look out the window. Slip out of a miserable mock-reality into a real reality of secret thoughts that only you can have. Allow yourself to day-dream about nothing in particular.

You’ve had lovely sensations wafted upon you in the past. Remember those. Create those again. Feel yourself somewhere between boredom and bliss. Enjoy a thousand vague and delicious impressions.

Relish every morsel of food and drop of drink that enters your mouth. Relish every idle, dreamy and carefree thought that you have.

Work so you have time for leisure. Make introversion and loneliness your strength. Make weakness your strength. Experience every nuance of country-roads, gardens, old walls, leafy lanes, wood paths and twilight harbours.

Devour life and defy it to get in your way of enjoyment.

In situations with difficult people, study them from your observation post (yourself). Experiment with yourself. Imagine seeing out of their eyes. You don’t have to love them or like them, just be kind to them. Sympathize with them.

Everyone is doing their best to feel enjoyment. It’s just that some people don’t get it. They can’t laugh at themselves. Enjoyment eludes them. Help them. If you feel annoyed, ask: What’s funny about this?

Look at people with a comedian’s eye, not to be mean, vulgar or glib, but to help yourself enjoy them and yourself with them and they you.

Picture yourself as the Good Humor Ice cream man. Switch from serious to good humorous. Alter your default settings by first focusing on your senses and then tell yourself to lighten up. Do something silly. Be free. People really are quite funny especially when they’re not trying.

The grand trick is to never have a single day without impressing into your memory stuff like a particular road, a specific tree, a particular treat, flights of birds, gusts of wind, interconnecting rain-rings in a puddle, hot afternoon fragrances… whatever!

Don’t worry if annoying things happen. Of course they happen! Annoying things are always bound to happen. Train yourself to get beyond them and be amused by them.

Beyond your five senses, humour could be your sixth. There’s nothing unseen about it. It’s available to everyone. You can’t help seeing what you see, but you can shape how you see. Combine your Walt Whitman Song of Myself with your Charlie Chaplin A Dog’s Life.In an annoying situation, you have two options: You can get all serious and feel ill-treated (not enjoyable) or you can be light without care. Ill-treatment is nothing to you. What do you expect? Who are you anyway?

Nobody. You are just another body envelope. Why not be the light?

The trick is to be absolutely determined to enjoy yourself. Don’t take yourself or life too serious. You know how it will end. Force yourself to enjoy. Will it to happen. Play music that gives you a charge of courage to forge ahead.

Go Buster Keaton on everybody and sing, “Don’t Bring Me Down!” to yourself without caring if anyone hears. Let “Enjoyment!” be your battle cry. Plunge into the experience of living. The water’s fine, even when it isn’t, and when it isn’t: It’s even better.

Enjoy.