Enjoy Your Life – The Abridged Version

Enjoy your life. Enjoy your life. Enjoy your life. What could be more unusual than having a life and not enjoying it! What sinister events occurred in secret managing to whisk away our enthusiasm for living and replace it with a litany of self imposed rules and standards. I should clarify. There is certainly nothing wrong with a standard based on ethics and a desire to do right. We should all aim to do right. You see, we are not yet pointing the question in the right direction. The question isn’t should we have or not have standards. The question is, do the standards we apply to ourselves have any basis in truth? Or said less loftily, are the rules we make for ourselves giving us life or taking it away? A life taken away, in whatever capacity, is a life no longer enjoyed. You can become your own worst enemy. You can drag yourself through the day in perpetual correction mode, ever evaluating, ever judging, ever being critical. You should not have eaten that. Why did you keep drinking that? Why do you drink at all? What is the matter with you? You need to play by the rules. Who do you think you are? The code names run ad infinitum, but they all speak to one common variable. They steal away your enjoyment for life.

Here’s a thought? What do you enjoy in life? Have you ever asked yourself this question? I suppose your answer doesn’t matter as much as your reasoning. Could you answer it honestly? Or did you have to modify it to suit a more acceptable answer. Your enjoyments are just that, “your enjoyments.” You get to choose them and you get to enjoy them. Your enjoyments are not really up for public scrutiny, that is unless you are a weirdo. You can’t have enjoyments that hurt people in any shape or form. Anyway, you have this life to enjoy. But, you have to pursue it. Pursue it by doing things you like. Do it on a school night. Watch a TV show you want to watch. You know you have more than one TV, couples. Bust out of that L7 square! Do your life differently. We are all on our own journey. At certain points in the journey it dawns on us that we spend a lot of our time acting like we are someone else. The “this is how I want you to behave” version. Or, we have to play different roles. We have mastered office politics. On the journey, although we all have different roles, we don’t have to play them as someone else. Be yourself, unashamed, unafraid, unabashedly you. Why would you ever choose otherwise? You choose otherwise because you have unknowingly accepted a bunch of rules you have to follow to be okay in a day. And, woe unto you if you break the rules. Yet somewhere hidden in all of that fear-based rule following is the enjoyment of life you are missing. Break the rules again man. Rebel against the rules woman. Act like you acted when you were younger and weren’t afraid to break a rule and. You. Enjoyed. Your. Life! Enjoy your life man.

It’s almost as if there is a war being waged with our fun. We are just not quite free to enjoy it. Or, so we think. There has to be a catch, a downside, and as yet undiscovered problem waiting to surface. “All good times must come to an end.” Fun is over, back on your heads! Watch out. Be careful now. Don’t go overboard with it. Cut back. Trim it down. Is that your second or third? Why do you think dry January is so popular? It’s a bunch of folks proving to themselves they are not what their head said they were, or might become or likely to which they will fall prey. Yet, control is always useful and necessary and even required. Your enjoyment cannot begin to control you or exalt itself above all else. There is always a time and a place. Don’t let the Rule Master tell you otherwise. Sometimes in the war against fun, special sentries are dispatched. Their sole mission is to f*ck up your fun. They flood your mind with all that’s messed up about your enjoyments until they succeed in making your enjoyments unenjoyable. “They eff up a wet dream, if I could be so crass. (Sorry Mom, honey and my kids) You just get deluged with so many negative reasons that you can’t even find your fun anymore. Oh, it’s still there it’s just buried behind a wall of criticism, or threats or an attack on the status quo. Sit down, shut up and wait for your next instruction. And alas, deep into the fight last arrive the high ranking goonies, hell bent on making you feel guilty for the extreme violation your enjoyment has caused or might cause or will probably cause. You can’t just have all that fun and not expect consequences. There is work to be done. You are just wasting valuable time you could spend doing what someone else wants you to do. Push, work, grind. No time for enjoyment. Enjoy your life lady.

There is the potential for you to enjoy your life every single day. Oh you can’t enjoy every piece of it maybe because you live in a big world. But, you can enjoy most of it. You can break free from the mental chains that have been surreptitiously wrapped around your neck. You can let your rule book fall to the ground. Not the rule book, your rule book. You can untie those self-imposed cords that have been making it hard to breathe. Still waiting to exhale. You can do it. Give yourself permission. It’s not God dogging you out all day. He doesn’t roll like that. The world and it’s systems did it to you. Scary people did it to you. Your parents, because they loved you so much, did it to you. But, now you get to make your own life choices. Pursue what you enjoy and be okay enjoying it. You’ll know if you need to modify and adjust and when you know, you know. Stop trading away your enjoyment for life based on other people’s rules about how you ought to enjoy it. Do you boo! There is simply no other person to be. Enjoy your life.

Just some good thoughts…