Do You Give Yourself Some Pleasant Time?

Making sense of being with yourself for nothing

Are you scared to give yourself a little pleasant time?

What is a pleasant time?

I don’t know. Maybe something like winding up your day — as the evening is about to give in to the darkness — by sitting alone by yourself and sing to yourself some meaningless songs.

Maybe even sit and daydream like a fool. To just see where your imagination might take you.

Smell the pages of a book as you set the thin pages of the book into motion by scrolling your thumb through them.

Maybe it doesn't matter. We all get to sleep at least, anyway, hopefully :).

Or maybe you have some hobbies already without even knowing they were a thing — good for you.

Or whatever it is. You get the idea :) The point is are you able to give yourself a little pleasant time.

Had we lost all interest in making sense out of giving ourselves a pleasant time or is it just that we are scared.

Maybe we are ashamed. We might be believing it is sinful or that we don't deserve it.

Maybe we are scared to see that we had lost our ability to give ourselves some good time.

Maybe we are brainwashed to consider it childish by others who suffer from neurosis but see it as maturity.

Maybe we make up for that inability by indulging in struggles, distractions, and pleasure consumption.

Or maybe we replace porn with video games and pretend we became mature — self-help bragging. Or we would even do some hard work to earn some guilt-free pleasure consumption. (just kidding :) ) Not to disrespect anyone’s pain or their coping mechanism. We all have it, we all indulge in pleasure from time to time, be it emotional eating or social media addiction, or anything at all.

I just had a shower and realized I missed it completely — like where was I even?.

I had to carry a hot tea in a cup a short distance, but I hurried instead of taking the time to experience walking with the teacup without spilling it out. That effort is too much — my mind said, and not only that, there is no guarantee that I would not spill it out. Not only I missed a possible opportunity to slow down also the hot tea let it know its hotness on my fingers. :)

Of course, we do have our mind-blowing rationalizations.

A pleasant time is not necessarily a pleasure time.

When you see a plant or a flower dancing in the wind, it is a pleasant view. Not everything has to be giving us pleasure for our attention.

We might even feel ashamed to expose ourselves appreciating a flower, yet people grow plants and flowers as if some sort of a rule without any slightest interest in appreciating them–more like a way to fill time or I am wrong.

Had you seen cows laying down on the beach for nothing?

No pleasure = not worthy of attention != true — some weird coding skills there :)

Maybe it is for this inability that we fall into addictions. We could even be scared to just lay on the bed and relax, and so we reach out for our phones hoping to distract us from this profound inability.

Maybe we had become too lazy to see to that.

Not that we can force us to have a pleasant time on purpose (that would be more pain) but nevertheless a seed can be planted and allowed to sprout.

“Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies”―Erich Fromm

Perhaps this could fall under the prompt “appreciating the small things” :)

Written in response to Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她)’s :