Enjoy

Today I had a conversation with someone about my thesis. He talked about getting the thesis done, etc. and it got to the point where I said that it was important to enjoy what we wrote. To my surprise, he said that we didn't need to enjoy it; it was more important to just get it done. Wow! Had the world changed without me knowing it?
If I thought about everything from the view point of just "getting it done," I was robbed of my humanness!

- I got up because I had to.
- I showered because I had to.
- I ate because, well, I had to!
- I wore clothes because - I had to? :D
- I worked because I had to. Yes, most of us felt that way.
- Everything I did was because... I had to.

While in fact, enjoying it and getting it done could make such a big difference.
That made me remember one of the readings I had last semester. Donna Haraway said that everything should begin with love and appreciation - when she talked about human and non-human relationships. So when we viewed a "paper," often times we looked at the paper as merely an "it." A non-living thing. Something dead. What if with appreciation, we thought about a paper as something with life in it? Last semester, my good friend Rae wrote a paper about her pregnancy, and that paper surely had a life. That paper talked, to her, to me - as one of her readers, and I was sure to many other people who read it as well. I liked to think about it as not only I wrote or created a paper, but that paper also created me. It wrote me.

If I got another opportunity to ask, I would ask that I enjoyed what I did, or what "it" (whatever it was) did, to me.



p.s. And now I'll enjoy reading Maryamah Karpov and watching Laskar pelangi, both sent by Vivi in NY. Thanks Vi, because you know what it means to enjoy something.