The Essence of Life : Enjoyment

All of us remain busy in our careers, professions, successes, money, etc. for most of the time, leaving no time for enjoying what we have, or doing what we love to do. We keep always worried for giving out our best performance on our profession, but never to enjoying life. It is because we get too much attached to our ‘performance identity’ rather than our ‘enjoyment identity’. Rising prices, our competitive mind with others, and our awareness of what others with think of us, are the principal culprits for which we keep on missing our respective lives. 

Like professional and social intelligences, we care for, we need to care equally, if not more, for emotional intelligence to enjoy life. For this, we need to have some time free from our identity as a performer for successes in career, profession, or income generation.

Most of think that we are what we do, rather than what intrinsic value we have – as a person, as a social animal, as a parent, etc. We measure ourselves through our income rather than through the happiness we have as a living being. As a result, we get reduced just as any product having a price tag. This is not only a problem of us individually, but that of our society too that judges us by our earning value.

Modern researches suggest that a secret of a satisfied life lies in out of the work experiences, those stir us our respective core values. Each of us has a basic psychological need of pursuing an authentic interest or passion to get the satisfaction no where found in external accomplishments. 

The plain reason for this is that a performance-oriented mind remains engaged in the output rather than the activity itself, thus missing the pleasure of playing. When the mind is freed from the performance objective, it enjoys the working every moment of it. In this process, we not only lose the pleasure but also sacrifice our performance efficiency. If we work with full concentration on work without bothering for the result, we not only enjoy working but also perform better. When we work better, the outcomes have to be better. When the person gets cutoff from the result, the work itself becomes like a leisure activity. Therefore, these are the leisure activities that provide us pleasures and add value to our respective lives. Higher the involvement in activities free from results, higher is the contentment in life. 

I have been at it for a long time leaving my Engineering profession. Though it diminished my income and its potential, I got a lot of contentment from living leisurely, just to check up what life has for me.

 Some important points to take note of regarding enjoying life are –

1. Don’t just work, but experience and feel every moment of working being a keen observant. Not only that you will enjoy working, but your performance shall improve as a byproduct. 

2. Trust yourself rather than looking for others’ evaluation of you. Let others think or say anything, you just go by your own decision. But decide your path very carefully.

3. Be innovative. Purposefully, look for what others are missing in actions or ways, just do that to be the pioneer of the new path – a sure way of getting contentment.

4. Play the endeavor you take up instead of taking it as an essential burden on you. Just consider that you are doing that for pleasure, not for getting any particular result.

As you do these, you will gradually be breaking off your performance identity and enter into a new arena of happiness of life.