Do you remember your road trips as a child? How you just wanted to get to the destination? Do you remember badgering your parents with “When will we get there”? I certainly do.
A few years ago, I realized that as an adult I do pretty much the same thing. Every day I was just trying to get tasks checked off my list. In terms of the road trip metaphor, doing the task is the journey and having done the task is the destination.
For me, life became more about finishing tasks than enjoying the doing. There was a constant desire to be on the other side of every task. It was the life equivalent of “When will I get there?”.
Unlike road trips, in life, all we get is the journey – the doing. For when one task is finished, it is onto the next and then the next. So might as well enjoy the doing.
Every time we want to be finished with a task, we are postponing our happiness. We are saying that the current task is boring, uninspiring or mundane. When we do that often enough, the joy of life starts to wilt. Life becomes a drag. Everything feels tedious.
Real happiness is in enjoying the journey. In every task, no matter how ordinary, is the potential for great joy. For joy, is a consequence of total absorption in a task, being fully present to what we are doing without thinking about the past or future.
One thought that may be on your mind. “All of this sounds nice. But I don’t really have the time to do every task slowly”. What I have learned over time is that speed has nothing to do with it.
It is urgency born out of the desire to be finished with the task that is the enemy of happiness. In fact, if we are fully absorbed in a task, we will be extremely efficient. Both in terms of time and energy.
So if we want to be truly happy, we have to learn to enjoy the journey of life, every single moment of it. Lucky indeed is the person who can do that.