"Joyful Living"

It was interesting to read about the three “solutions" to bringing more “joyful living” into our lives. The following is how I might apply these solutions to improve how I feel about my job and school.

Looking first at work, I will go back in time to when I didn’t have a job I enjoy. When I was first going to college many years ago, I worked nights at the phone company processing payments half the evening and encoding them the other half, which was very boring work! I can easily apply all three “solutions” to this situation.

The first solution makes a distinction between work and play. We work for the sake of something else; we play for its own self. I was working in order to pay for school and I “played” on Friday nights by going to Happy Hour at restaurants to eat the free food and have fun. The second solution is to take the view that play is an attitude that can take place in any activity. During my boring job, I challenged myself to be the fastest, most accurate processor, and I had fun achieving that. The third solution is to understand that joy and pain often come together and both can be valued. I knew that the pain of working brought the joy of being able to afford my education, so that’s how I valued both.

As far as my school goes and the first solution, I work in courses for career development and I walk and hike in natural settings for play. For the second solution, I make it a game to see if I can finish my homework one week in advance. For the third solution, I know that doing all the assigned reading, homework, projects and papers can be real work that is sometimes a pain, but I do enjoy learning, so there’s pain and joy in taking courses.