Today I’d like to continue our discussion of joy and pleasure, as kirism makes a point of acknowledging hardship and suffering but also reminds us that joys and pleasures are available to us. It would be a shame to not notice that or to forget that!
What makes pleasure more likely? Awareness. There is a link between awareness and pleasure. You will experience more pleasure as you become wiser about what defeats pleasure, what stunts pleasure, and what promotes pleasure.
Say, for instance, that you enter a café where you intend to work on your novel. It is very noisy. You rather like noise, so you idly think, “I can write here.” But in a corner of your mind, you know that this café is just too noisy. You override that awareness and take a seat.
Five minutes later, you hear yourself say, “I can’t write today.” You’d been anticipating a pleasurable hour with your novel and now you’re crestfallen. If you don’t identify that the noisy café thwarted you, you won’t understand how to create pleasure.
Pleasure may well await you at a quieter café. That may be all that is required to turn this misstep into a joyous hour. The novel didn’t fail you, cafés haven’t failed you, life hasn’t failed you. You simply sat down in a café that was too noisy.
So, find a quieter one. Pleasures are attainable in this way. You have a hunch that this or that might prove pleasurable. You try it. If it is, that is splendid. If it isn’t, you consider what happened. What a simple formula! Have a hunch, give it a try, then consider.
We consider, and we wisely decide to make investments in things that previously brought us joy. Did we previously enjoy mint chocolate chip ice cream? We invest in a pint. Did we in the past enjoy suspense fiction? We take ourselves to the library.
Of course, we know that there is no guarantee that we are going to get joy from that ice cream or that novel. But aren’t the odds on our side? The past does not predict the future but it certainly gives us something to go on!
By bringing this sort of awareness to life, we give ourselves the chance to experience pleasure and we give ourselves the chance to understand why something didn’t prove pleasurable. The lovely, super-simple principle? More awareness = more pleasure.
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Eric Maisel is the author of 50+ books. You can learn more about him at www.ericmaisel.com, subscribe to all of his blog posts at https://authory.com/ericmaisel, learn more about kirism here, and write him at [email protected]