“A life of pleasure and radical enjoyment require knowledge and practice,” Rebbe Gafni.  For as much as we all understand what pleasure and enjoyment are, they are incredibly subjective terms.  While we all know what joy is, we all experience joy at different things.  A concept we need to remember is that joy and happiness come from within.  While certain experiences, people, things etc. can bring joy, joy is still something that comes from within—we decide when we feel joy so joy is a personal experience.  We have a complex relationship with the purpose of life.  Is it joy and the pursuit of happiness?  Is it work?  Is it work that brings joy?  Is it time spent having fun and the pursuit of fun things? Is it the pursuit of things and power?  And then is it power over ourselves or power over others? I mean, none of us really have the same pursuits in life or decide on the same means of attaining those pursuits… Is it working and creating value in our personal lives and hopefully sharing that with others? Some people want to be writers while others want to be fighters.  Some want to paint and others want to save lives.  Some want to understand life and some want to understand death.  In this world there is the need for AND.  We need the creativity AND the drive.  We need the strength AND the gentleness.  We need the joy AND the purpose.  We need the fun AND the intention.  We need the boundaries AND the flexibility of understanding.

The real pleasure of life is in finding the balance.  It isn’t in the constant pursuit of material or gain or power nor is it in the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment.  We soon find that in order to enjoy life, there is a degree of seriousness in that too.  We can’t just assume that what we wish for will appear.  There is a degree of that in manifestation and in faith but the point is we need to take action as well.  I’ve found that the real pleasure in life is in self-mastery.  That comes with understanding who we are and what we want to do.  It comes with being who we are and following through on what we say we will.  It’s in exploring and finding what truly brings us joy in the first place.  That is forming the knowledge mentioned in the opening quote.  The practice comes with trying it out.  Discovering what we like and learning about it and then putting it to use, trying it on.  I am the first person to admit an aversion to saying yes.  I often feared getting saddled with responsibility I didn’t want or being unduly burdened with what other people wanted me to do for them.  I didn’t want to work on their dreams.  I wanted the time to work on my own desires.  And in order to do that, we need to take the time to learn about it rather than be distracted with what other people tell us to do—or what we should do.  if we are going to find pleasure and joy in life, we need to figure out what pleasure and joy are to us.

We have such a weird relationship with life in general and as humans we have an even weirder relationship with how we feel about life.  Like, we want to let go and have fun but we tie ourselves down to a routine that we neither asked for or enjoy but we fully participate in it.  We seek freedom in as many areas of our lives as possible but we play by these rules.  Look, I advocate for neither extreme rules or extreme freedom because if we adopt either end of the spectrum, we are either living in an autocratic/fascist/dictatorship or we are living in between total anarchy/nihilism/lala land.  Neither really works. We don’t want people telling us what to do but we also want someone responsible for us and at the same time we want freedom with the security of being able to support ourselves.  The thing is this: we will always be in between.  We are never all one thing or another and that is the point of balance.  The thing with balance is that we need to practice it and take responsibility for it.  we need to understand it and practice it and see how we feel in it.  We need to understand how we feel and what we want and, at the core of it all, who we are and what our purpose is.  We can have fun, pleasure, enjoyment, but to understand the full capacity of it we need to take it seriously to a degree.  We learn about it. 

No one has all the answers but I do know that in order for us to find a sense of purpose we need to acknowledge and honor who we are and in order to do that we need to take the time to explore.  We need to allow more “yes” into our lives and stop turning away what we are afraid of or what we are afraid of taking responsibility for.  If we want joy, we have to take responsibility for finding and creating joy.  If we want pleasure, we need to learn what pleasure is to us.  The same with purpose and freedom.  All of those things, while we are seeking a life or moment of peace and ease, require us to dive in and do the work. To learn about who we are and what we are capable of.  To learn that we can push further than we thought we could and to own our choices, to fully navigate through life.  When we practice this and understand the layers of what we do, an entire world opens up for us with new levels to attain and pursue.  To let go, we have to take up the reins of our choices and explore it with ravenous curiosity and care.  Once we open the door, once we take that first step, it isn’t that far of a leap to find the key to success in our lives, and open the door to a life of joy and happiness AND purpose—we can make it one in the same.