A New Way of Looking

Here’s the thing: If someone says, “The secret to life is...,” that person is unknowingly (or knowingly) misleading. Why?

Because.

It isn’t a secret. If it was a secret, everyone’s secret would be different.

It’s like looking for keys and not finding them even though they’re right under your nose. You’re in a hurry but waste time running around looking for keys and not finding them because you’re in a hurry! You look repeatedly on the table where they should be (and are) but you don’t see them. Why? In desperation you start looking in weird places. So too do people look for enjoyment in weird place when they don’t have to. Enjoyment is right under your nose.

When you finally do find find your keys, you feel extra extra annoyed because they were there all along, and you wonder: “How could I not see them? Am I blind? (No.) Am I an idiot? (Only partly).”

The power is in the focus. It’s a matter of attention. It’s all a matter of awareness.

In the hurry to find what you’re looking for you see with eyeballs but not with brain. Hurry causes stress. Stress causes the release of cortisol in the brain. Cortisol can kill brain cells in the area responsible for memory (Your Amazing Brain). If you add multi-tasking to a frantic searching, you have zero attention (Brain Rules…).

Searching for keys in all the wrong places is like searching for enjoyment. We don’t see what’s in front of us. Enjoyment is simple. It’s so simple that we don’t get it until we do and then we doubt it because we might be expecting something that isn’t so subtle.

If you’re reading this—wherever you are in this world—you’re probably alive. If you’re alive, you’re halfway there, but the other half isn’t easy. Nature isn’t on your side. Nature isn’t on anyone’s side. Nature is cause and effect.

The trouble is that happiness gets tied to desire and expectations. We define happiness as, Wanting what we want and getting what we get and hoping the two coincide.

You see, it’s because of our brains. We either over-think and make it complicated, we under-think and act on insane urges or we multi-task and miss everything.

We think, “If I have this (or that), I’ll be happy,” but not only do we think that something outside ourselves will make us happy, we’re drawn to things that actually hurt us.

Our brains send messages. Sometimes these messages are destructive—ask anyone in therapy, rehab, prison or who is about to blow himself up. Not only do we deceive ourselves, other people trick us with their deceptions and w can become like pawns in the game of life, sacrificed for someone else’s idea of enjoyment.

So, what’s the answer?

Picture brain messages symbolically like they do in cartoons with a devil-you and an angel-you on each shoulder arguing their case for you to decide (see Internal Multitudes and Enjoyment Decisions). The devil-you often wins and when he does, he gets harder to stop.

Pleasure and habit are linked. Cells that fire together, wire together. In other words: Habits are hard to break (see: It’s not me. It’s my brain.)

It’s like a battle between, on one side, the Rolling Stones at 120 decibels singing “Sympathy For The Devil”, “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste,” and on the other side, a string quartet playing “Hallelujah” in your living room.! Who do you think will win?

On one side are symbols of light, innocence and wholesomeness (sappy?) and on the other, just the opposite (exciting?). In the battle between it comes down to focus. What do you choose to enjoy?

Enjoyment of life and of healthy beauty is decided by awareness of what “you” choose to pay attention to.

Do you take the gentle path of life as represented in Wordsworth’s poem, “I wandered lonely as a cloud; That floats on high o’er vales and hills; When all at once I saw a crowd; A host, of golden daffodils“? Or is that boring? “Daffodils? You’re kidding!”

Do you prefer your entertainment on the excitingly evil side? How about delightful depravity and edgy cruelty that’s funny too? What’s your pleasure? Do you choose a quiet read, a walk in the park, a pint with a friend, or ‘gorified’ death in a Zombie Apocalypse?

It’s a tough decision for most people.

Subtlety is missed by mobs fed on chatter, drugs, violence, convenience and bread and circuses. A butterfly caught in a web is easily killed by the spider. It takes heart and courage and a focus on what is wholesome to overcome dark greed.

Wholesome isn’t a word used much these days. It alludes to marketing all-natural breakfast cereals and family values but back in the year 1200 wholesome meant “of benefit to the soul.” It comes from the word “whole” meaning “healthy” (undamaged, entire, safe) and “-some” meaning “tending to” (Etymology Dictionary).

Wholesome relates to “Hallow!” as in Hello! Health! Holy! It’s a greeting and a call to health and Hallelujah! (Word Origins).

Imagine: You go to a concert in a high school auditorium but your brain is messed up with problems. You miss the first part before your spirit gets caught up in the music and then… and then…

A switch to whole.

You see where you are. Your face relaxes. Totally still you breathe and your eyes… your eyes! they widen and go slack. You see as if you were life itself.

What was a disheveled auditorium with flickering light bulbs about to die and chattering nuisance people becomes… beautiful. You enter the stream. You are empty absolutely. You know that life runs along like a runaway train as you float in your body behind a face.

A scene.

You look out of yourself self-aware. This moment is captured in the very being of yourself – not as an ego, but as… a spirit.

The purest illuminations come unsought.

You are transfigured but no one knows. How could they? You are alone in yourself but through the eyes of another you see the importance of all this. It’s in relationships and immersion. You’ve put your will to the side and thrown yourself out.

Such is enjoyment seeing.

Cease demanding that life conform to desire. See daffodils and ignore zombies (they aren’t real).

Wisdom Enjoyment

Enjoyment is a kind of longing. We long to enjoy but life gets in the way; yet life – at least, the bits we like – is the enjoyment we crave. We want to feel the freedom of enjoyment, but there’s stuff to do and not enough time. We feel the need to win the lottery but that’s a fool’s game or as Seneca (Stoic philosopher, 54 BC – 39 AD) put it, “A fortune is great slavery.” He also said, “A happy life is one which is in accordance with its own nature,” but… anyway…

Our longing grows until enjoyment becomes a fantasy unrealisable. We see the rich seemingly enjoying themselves and want to be one of them. We forget how real enjoyment – like the kind we felt as kids – feels. A kid doesn’t need millions of dollars. She enjoy listening to seashells. She doesn’t know the waves she hears is ambient noise coupled with imagination.

Enjoyment is like that. It’s in ourselves. We get confused and try to fill the enjoyment void with things unwise.

We think, “If only I had some time to just sit, outside, comfortably, with a cup of coffee and a book,” or, “if only I wasn’t so bored,” or, “if only I could go for a walk and feel peaceful and not bugged by the things I have to do.”

It’s like that song chugging along with the words, “Don’t know why I have to work. Don’t know why I can’t play. Turn me off. Turn me out. But don’t turn me away. Save Me a Place” (Lindsey Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac, 1979).

How does a person who longs for enjoyment (and love, peace, contentment, kindness, humour, ecstasy and all the other happy emotions wrapped into one) ever experience enjoyment when the world seems bent towards making us feel the opposite?

The daily grind of work, boredom and problems makes enjoyment incidental or non-existent. If you long for enjoyment, how can you get it when there’s all this other @#$%… stuff to deal with?

One word: Discipline.

It isn’t the world that’s a problem. It’s you. It takes a few deep breaths and a disciplined surrender to what is. Stop resisting and enjoy yourself without expectation. Good or bad – it’s all good.

Things are rarely the way you want them to be. Enjoyment takes will-power and courage. It takes initiative and imagination. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they are” (The Social Contract, 1762).

Rousseau in 1753. He freely expressed emotions, enjoyed solitary walks and longed to understand himself.

Say out loud to yourself, “Let go,” and then, “Enjoy!” Let “Relax!” be your battle cry! Who cares if people think you’re crazy?

Enjoyment is in your eyes. Fling open your senses. If you can do that, you are a philosopher of enjoyment. You are an intellectual yokel. You can gape freely at this weird and wonderful world as sensible people take it all for granted.

Here we are, living on a ball of rock spinning around an immense sphere of fire as organisms go through creature rearrangement, mutual slaughter and flourish by chewing each other up.

Nothing strange about that.

We struggle to find our way. Think about wisdom. It nudges you closer to it. Consider your life: your decisions. your values, your shortcomings. Wisdom understands the context of who you are, where you are and what is prudent to do. Enjoyment enjoys. It’s a matter of wise choices. Think big picture and notice little things.

Wise choices combine facts about reality and human nature with awareness of culture, history and the context of your life span. Wisdom understands values and priorities. It projects insight, good judgement and emotional regulation.

A philosopher of enjoyment memorizes wise sayings like: “Ageing can be fun if you lay back and enjoy it” (Clint Eastwood); “neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy” (Voltaire); “one should eat to live, not live to eat” (Cicero); “Don’t sweat the petty things, and don’t pet the sweaty things” (Small). Ultimately, wisdom is to enjoyment what red is to a tomato.

Put a light bulb in your pocket. Pull it out. Hold it over your head and say, “I have an idea!”

Enjoy yourself. What have you got to lose?

And the Waiter said, “Enjoy.”

It’s common for a waiter to say, “Enjoy,” after he sets a plate of food in front of a customer. If you check into a hotel, the clerk will say, “Enjoy your stay,” and when you hand in your ticket at a theatre, the ticket-taker will say, “Enjoy the movie.” It’s as common for people in the hospitality industry to say enjoy as it is for them to smile, but have you ever thought of this sentence fragment as your call to action?

The next time someone says, “enjoy” to you: Do it. So what if the soup is tepid and watery? Some people don’t get soup. Find pleasure, not fault. Enjoy. Waiters who say enjoy hope enjoyment happens. It’s their wish. Jobs (and gratuities) depend on it. You can make wishes come true.

Enjoyment is what this philosophy is about. This isn’t esoteric or hard to understand. This is practical. This is the spirit of living. The idea is for you to work out a practical philosophy of your own that’s applicable to ordinary life. Through various mental, emotional and aesthetic tricks (like hearing the word enjoy as your call to action), you can wrestle with life and grow less miserable as month follows month and year to year.

Whether a meal meets your expectations or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s a matter of chance, but even the worst meal can be stellar if you have no harsh criticisms and can see the humour in blue soup. It’s like what Forrest Gump’s mother said about life being a box of chocolates, “You never know what you’re gonna get.”

To enjoy – really, really enjoy – keep it simple. Be kind. Enjoy humility. All creatures (including you) need food energy from the sun. Eating is to live and living is to enjoy living. To feel the creative magic of humility, don’t use grandiose terms like “cosmos” and “universe.” Focus on the details right in front of you. Forget infinity. It’s too big. Focus on the finite.

All of this is of course unsolicited advice and nobody likes that. The boy who snaps an elastic band until it thwacks him in the eye despite his mother’s nagging him to stop doesn’t appreciate it when his father says, “See. You were told it would snap. Now look at you. You have one eye.”

The trouble with advice is that sometimes it comes from people who stink of sanctimoniousness. That’s partly why teenagers ignore their parents’ advice. Parents think they’re superior. It’s why parents ignore the advice of their parents. It’s why bosses are maligned and why traffic safety rules are flouted.

Watch people who enjoy themselves unwisely. Watch a guy racing carelessly around on his jet ski until he runs into the side of another guy who is also racing carelessly around on his jet ski. It’s all fun and games until someone gets killed.

The common assumption is that enjoyment is selfish, but real enjoyment isn’t. It’s a celebration. It says to death, “See you later.”

In his novel In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove published in 1919, Marcel Proust wrote, “We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, and effort which no one can spare us.” The same can be said for enjoyment. Substitute the word wisdom with enjoyment and here’s what you get: “We are not provided with enjoyment, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, and effort which no one can spare us.”

Go into the wilderness of experience.

And enjoy.

Snakes and Ladders and Butterfly Kisses

What sets the philosophy of enjoyment apart is the will to enjoy. It’s an application of willpower to enjoyment. Willpower is normally used to deny immediate gratification for a long-term goal. We force ourselves to do things that we don’t want to do – not enjoy dessert, not enjoy a drink, not spend money – or we make ourselves do things we’d rather not do – run on a treadmill, work late, eat bran flakes. This “will to enjoy” is the opposite of that.

People think that with enough willpower they can improve their lives, but results from the American Psychological Association’s 2011 Stress in America Survey shows that a lack of willpower is the No. 1 reason for people not making healthy lifestyle changes (see: What You Need to Know About Willpower: The Psychological Science of Self-Control). People blame faulty willpower for their imperfect choices, but is willpower to blame?

What if you turned willpower on its head? Instead of willing yourself to not do things that you want to do or to do things you don’t want to do, step out of self-conflicts and will yourself to do what you want. Force yourself to enjoy! Does it take an effort to do what you want?

Enjoyment is subtle. It’s so simple people miss it. We focus on big stuff like long term goals and on more of something when it’s actually less that we need. It’s the butterfly kiss of happiness that we miss. Less is more (more or less).

If you enjoy ice cream, does it take willpower to make yourself have some? No. It’s what you want! Be reasonable and force yourself to enjoy ice cream! Use willpower to do what you want and it doesn’t take an effort.

Optimize every scrap of enjoyment. Be enjoyment strategic and remember that too much ice cream isn’t enjoyable. It’ll make you sick. If you understand the fragile nature of enjoyment, you’ll know how to play it. Enjoyment is a game of strategy.

According to John P. Carse in the book Finite and Infinite Games there are two kinds of games. There are finite games where the object is to win and there are infinite games where the object is to continue playing. The suggestion here is that you make wholesome enjoyment your infinite game.

Note the word “wholesome.” In this infinite game things that bring pleasure (i.e., things we enjoy) can be muddled with pain. Eating chili peppers or running marathons, for example, can bring a strong pleasure, but too many chili peppers and marathons can become painful!

When we enjoy something, we want to experience more of that something, but it’s important to separate the source of that pleasure from the state of feeling pleased. Chocolate cake can be a source of enjoyment, but if you eat chocolate cake all the time you can get sick of it. A source that brought you pleasure in the past can become a source of pain (see: Wholesome Pleasure).

The world isn’t necessarily a friendly place. It doesn’t owe you happiness. What does it mean to force yourself to enjoy? It means to make a choice to enjoy and to use willpower to generate a fighting spirit. With a fighting spirit, take every annoyance, every pain, every discomfort, every sickness, every humiliation, every horror, every fear as all in a day’s work in the infinite game of living. Play to continue playing. Enjoy to continue enjoying.

Picture unhappiness as a woman determined to be unhappy. She’s your personal antagonist and her breath is not good. Now, imagine playing a game of Snakes and Ladders (aka Chutes and Ladders) with her. Will it be enjoyable? Most people would think not, but for a philosopher of enjoyment, it’s a challenge.

The game is considered by some as a metaphor for life. On the board of Snakes and Ladders there’s a grid of numbered squares with pictures of snakes and ladders each connecting two board squares. The object of the game is to navigate your piece according to die rolls from the bottom to the top helped by ladders and hindered by snakes.

Historically, the ladders represented virtues (positive emotions) – they take you up – and the snakes represented vices (negative emotions) – they take you down. The trick to winning is to get lucky and have more virtues than vices.

If you are going to enjoy the game with a sad halitosis friend, you have to roll with what happens. It’s beyond your control anyway. Accept what you get. Look for ladders and avoid snakes. Enjoy both the ups and downs. Have a conversation with yourself. Encourage yourself to enjoy. Be a good companion to yourself and kind to your unhappy friend. Offer her a mint and your own enjoyment. Enjoyment is like laughter, it’s contagious.

The only thing you control is the way you think. Win or lose, it doesn’t matter. Enjoy Snakes and Ladders like you’re ten years old and it’s 1927. Imagine the enjoyment and you have it! Play the music and fly baby fly! Help others by helping yourself. When you defy depression and enjoy yourself, you win even when you lose.

Roll the die before it’s you.

Here’s The Thing

Everyone knows that horrible, terrible, and disgusting things happen. The News is not always good. People are nuts. Flies exist and it’s hard to open a pickle jar now and again, but that’s beside the point!

We know that bad stuff happens! It’s obvious – just look around – but could bad stuff be just a distraction? With your head well-above the sand, you can probably see how life oscillates between good and bad, on and off, life and death. First good, then bad, then good, bad, bad, good – you get the picture. Life is fraught with adversity. Life lives off of itself. It truly is a bitter sweet symphony.

If you want to enjoy the experience of living as you are in this body with that face that looks back at you dumbly, you have to try to enjoy living. In so doing enjoyment is shared forward. This is your Philosophy of Enjoyment. It comes with a money back guarantee.

If you want to will yourself happy, you need the courage and freedom to become nothing but an impersonal consciousness. This isn’t to say that you don’t care for others, it’s just that you are willing to be light as a feather. To be nothing-but-an-impersonal-consciousness means that you excuse yourself from self-importance.

To enjoy, really enjoy, one must be so immersed that one becomes enjoyment. One becomes the eyes that see and the ears that hear. The islands of other selves all around are doing the same. Each person feels alone so be kind to every one of them, for each one is a another you.

What is the value of a frog? Not much, but the value of a frog to itself is priceless. A healthy frog is a happy frog. To live to enjoy living is what a frog appears to be doing. Why else would it try so hard to get away? A living frog wants to keep living. To be a frog another day is the goal of every frog eating a fly. That’s what this trip is about. It’s circular. To live is to enjoy living and to enjoy living is to make living enjoyable. You are like a frog except for the unexpectedly long sticky tongue.

No matter how great you might think you are: you’re not. Nobody is superior to any one else. Much depends on chance, opportunity and ability. People get misplaced priorities. They judge. They find fault or they grieve over faults. People get self-absorbed. They do some smart things and they do some stupid things, but when you get right down to it, under the skin, behind the eyes, in the heart, everybody is a lonely soul within a singularity.

The key to enjoyment is to lose one’s self in the enjoyment of living or, as Kurt Vonnegut so aptly put it, “We’re here to fart around.” Making a lot of yourself can get in the way of enjoyment. Expect what you get and get what you expect. The more important you think you are, the more you set yourself apart.

Life isn’t easy. Even those who find it easy say it isn’t. Why be surprised when there’s trouble? Trouble is part of not having trouble. Being untroubled is to be without it. The trick to enjoyment is to defy trouble. Troubling trouble by being untroubled is enjoyable. It’s fun to say, “Troubles be gone!” 

To be untroubled is freedom from trouble. Freedom from trouble is enjoyable. Anything enjoyable is itself enjoyable. Bring it on home!

Defy! Defy! Defy! Just as it is easier to endure pain, anxiety and calamity with defiance, so too is it easier to enjoy enjoyment by defying it to be otherwise. Troubles are doubled when one resigns to them. Without expectations one is never dissatisfied. Be the wedge between sensation and emotion and feel the magic of life living.

Keep It Simple.

People dedicated to enjoyment enjoy the moment. Of course they do! They make the most of the moment even when it isn’t enjoyable. They imagine future enjoyment. They remember past enjoyment. They laugh instead of get mad (the double h of humour and humility) and they do it all without disgustingly fake good cheer.

Practitioners of enjoyment force themselves to enjoy no matter what’s happening. They know drudgery is necessary. Bumps are expected and tragedy strikes.

Dedicated enjoyers get into simple pleasures. They linger on ladybugs. They look out windows. They stare at the world like idiots and go into earth-trances. They squeeze enjoyment out of empty ketchup packets.

If someone is not dedicated to enjoyment, enjoyment is accidental or nonexistent. The question then becomes: Why? Why leave enjoyment to chance? What’s more important? Is it a job? Is it family? Is it foreign policy?

If someone isn’t enjoying, it could be: a) the person is dedicated to enjoyment without knowing it and thus not doing a very good at it, or b) dedicated to something that is not enjoyable.

For person a) we need to look at how a person spends her day. Is time taken to contemplate nature and/or whatever? Are hot beverages sipped slowly with much noise? Does the person send mixed messages by wanting and not-wanting at the same time?

For person b) we recommend a careful examination of the following question: Why be dedicated to something not enjoyable?

Enjoyment comes from the self. Imagine that the words you are reading right here and now are actually coming from you. These are your words. It is your silent voice you hear.

Someone, somewhere, writes in the present for you to receive in the future and remember in the past. Past, present, and future are thus not compartmentalized – they are one, like a river is one. Water upstream is not separate from water downstream. It’s one body from beginning to end. The same is true of time and your life. It is one event from beginning to end. It is a flowing. Your shape changes and thoughts come come and go, but the consciousness within is consistent.

If words of enjoyment come from you, you will obey. You cannot be told to enjoy. That doesn’t work. Enjoyment must come from your own motivation.

Words from the Philosophy of Enjoyment are like arrows shot into the air. By a fluke of chance, they hit you. They hit with a reminder: Keep enjoyment foremost. Cultivate happiness. No one else will to do this for you. This is you we’re talking about – not some abstract notion of a person. You! You looking at this. Right now! This is your mirror. These are your thoughts you hear.

Keep enjoyment on your mind like that Willie Nelson song, Always On My Mind. You are enjoyment. Disappear into it and keep in mind a few pointers along the way:

1) Enjoyment doesn’t come with negative consequences. If if does, that’s not enjoyable. (It’s an old Epicurean idea.)

2) Avoid being like the person in the Irving Berlin song, After You Get What you Want You Don’t Want It. Want what you get. Be selective. Keep it simple and in tune with nature and yourself.

3) Don’t think about what you don’t want. Anything that you don’t want can make you feel bad. Feeling bad is not enjoyable.

If you think about how you don’t want cancer or your friend to die or for you to twist an ankle, that’s a bummer. You cause yourself suffering by thinking about what you don’t want. Hypothetical stories feel real. Worry circles around and you cook up a bad-tasting stew.

4) Avoid mixed messages. If you decide to have ice cream and make arrangements, but then worry that ice cream is bad for you, that’s a mixed message. Not enjoyable. If you want ice cream. Enjoy ice cream. A treat is a treat. Too much isn’t enjoyable. A special meal isn’t the time to worry about money. Commit to enjoy.

5) If you’re not enjoying yourself, ask: why? Contemplate enjoyment. Become an expert in it. There’s nothing supernatural or selfish about it. Enjoyment is there.

Make yourself enjoy. It starts here and now with sensual awareness and contemplation. When you feel real enjoyment in simple things that are easy to get like a ladybug on a blade of grass, you are home, even when you’re not.

Is It Serious?

We here at the Philosophy of Enjoyment have been working extra hard, day and night while listening to non-stop roaring twenties music, to make our enjoyment your priority!

No doubt as your philosophy of enjoyment takes shape, you’ve written down a few reoccurring themes in your official Philosophy of Enjoyment notebook (order yours today!), themes like: the value of nature; the importance of loneliness, weakness and inaction; how to use your will-power to force yourself to enjoy – even during a proctology exam; how to use yourself as an observation post; and, the importance of humour.

It is towards  humour that we cast our enjoyment net today.

Would you say that you’ve got a good sense of humour or are you a hard nut to crack? What makes you laugh? Is it slapstick, satire, the bizaare, or the goofball next door? On a scale from one to ten, how would you rate your ability to be amused? If you scored yourself less than a five on the amusement scale, you’ve got work to do. Watch some comedy. You might begin with Albert Brooks.

Not everyone will find Albert Brooks or any other comedian funny. It’s a matter of opinion. That’s not the point. This is not about what is and isn’t funny. This is about one’s ability to enjoy humour in the grind of day-to-day life. The question isn’t, Is it funny? The question is, Is it serious? or, How serious are you?

Humour is a funny thing. What one person takes as a joke, another will take as an offense. Where one person would laugh at an inflatable dart board, another would be afraid. Humour is an individual experience. It’s like one’s taste in music, fashion or food. It’s purely subjective.

Things look eggy.

We each have likes and dislikes. That’s what makes each of us unique individuals. Metaphorically speaking, we each wear eye glasses that colour our world. Our glasses are the thoughts, beliefs and attitudes we have. What colour are your eye glasses?

The point is not what you find funny or unfunny, the point is what’s your level of seriousness. Can you find amusement in the face of adversity or do you get depressed or angry? If you want to enjoy life, amusement is better.

We all know how humour can be used for good – to lighten a mood, to point out an absurdity – or for bad – to shock and to bully. Mean-spirited humour can stir a mob to brutality with emotions of hatred (not good) and gentle humour can soften an injury, make a bad situation better or create a good feeling (much better), but that’s not really the point.

The point of this isn’t to criticize mean-spirited comedy or to praise gentle comedy. This isn’t about finding fault or taking a side in the good/bad humour divide. The point isn’t to analyze comedy. That’s fatal! Everyone will laugh or not laugh at different things. To each his own, as they say.

The point of this is that it all depends upon your level of seriousness. If you’re too serious, you won’t enjoy anything. You’ll always find something to be disappointed about. Lighten-up! It isn’t that serious! Life isn’t serious. It’s to be enjoyed – no matter what!

If you don’t like not enjoying yourself, the trick is to create new thoughts to slowly replace the deep-seated beliefs that you have about yourself.

A philosopher of enjoyment repeats to himself: life isn’t serious! It could be worse! I laugh in the face of danger! Nothing gets me down! People are funny! It’s all good even when it isn’t. I am a light-hearted person. I take life as it comes. I laugh when I fall on my bum. Anything and everything can be funny. It’s in your attitude.

Don’t get so serious. What do you think? Post a comment. Let’s discus it.