Making Room for Enjoyment

You have to notice a good thing to enjoy it

You can eat a good meal and barely taste it, walk through a beautiful place while answering messages, or spend an evening with someone you love while thinking about work. Being somewhere is not the same as attending to what is there.

Desire includes more than appetite. We hunger for food and sexual pleasure, certainly, but we also respond to music, beauty, friendship, a story, a place, or a piece of work that engages us. The capacity to be moved by these things is part of what makes enjoyment possible.

There are two ways to lose that capacity. One is to let appetite govern your choices. The other is to become so wary of desire that little seems worth wanting. In the second case, a person may remain productive and responsible but take little pleasure in life. Even beauty and affection receive less attention.

The biblical story begins with God calling creation good. Saint Francis of Assisi responds to that goodness with delight. In the Canticle of the Creatures, he praises God through Brother Fire:

“All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brother Fire… How beautiful is he, how merry! Full of power and strength.”

Saint Francis of Assisi, Canticle of the Creatures

Francis speaks of water as humble and precious, and of fire as beautiful and merry. He looks at the familiar world with an affection that notices its particular qualities. His joy has something to teach anyone who has come to see the world mainly in terms of its uses.

Ecclesiastes likewise returns to meals, work, companionship, sunlight, and the person you love. It never forgets that these things are temporary. Their transience is a reason to receive them while they are here, not to despise them. Paul, while warning against trusting riches, writes of God as the one who “richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment” (1 Timothy 6:17).

Not everything good needs to be useful

Work is necessary, and it can be good in itself. Trouble begins when we expect every other part of life to justify its existence by what it produces. Exercise must improve our health, reading must improve our minds, and hobbies become more respectable when they develop a marketable skill. Even recreation becomes another task to perform well.

Josef Pieper described a “world of total work,” in which the habits of work spread beyond the workplace until leisure itself becomes difficult to understand. The question is no longer whether something is good or enjoyable, but whether it is useful.

A table carefully set, music played for pleasure, an unhurried meal, or an afternoon spent with friends needs no further justification. These things belong to a good life even when they produce nothing we can measure.

Sabbath goes further. Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, “The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else.” The work remains unfinished, but we stop. We relinquish, for a time, the belief that everything depends on our effort.

Such stopping takes practice when productivity has become a measure of personal worth. It may take even more practice to enjoy the time once it has been set aside.

What are you using pleasure for?

At the end of a difficult day, you may want nothing more than to get some relief. You turn on a show, pour a drink, eat something, or pick up your phone. There is nothing wrong with needing a break. But the same activity can help you recover, give you genuine pleasure, or keep you from thinking about what troubles you.

Brené Brown has written about the cost of numbing painful emotions. We may turn to food, alcohol, shopping, busyness, or screens to avoid shame, anxiety, grief, or disappointment. But we cannot reliably choose to feel less pain while keeping our full capacity for joy and connection.

“Numb the dark and you numb the light.”

Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

This is one reason chronic escape can leave a person feeling flat. It may reduce immediate discomfort without making life more enjoyable. The question is not whether the activity is permitted or forbidden, but what happens to you as you rely on it.

Ask yourself what you were looking for when you began, and how you felt when you stopped. Did you enjoy something, find needed relief, or mostly avoid being aware of your life for a while?

When pleasure becomes compensation

A hard week can make pleasure feel earned. “After all that, I deserve this.” Sometimes that simply means you are ready for a good meal, a drink, a game, a night out, or an evening with no demands.

The problem comes when you start asking pleasure to make up for a life you resent. The meal, purchase, screen, sexual release, substance, or weekend is no longer only something you enjoy. Now you are using it to make the rest of life bearable.

A man who cannot receive pleasure as gift will eventually demand it as wages.

A feast is part of a life you can return to. A fix is asked to compensate for the life around it.

When you are using pleasure this way, stopping gets harder. A meal ends. A fix keeps finding reasons for one more drink, one more episode, one more purchase, one more hour.

Reward research helps explain why. “Wanting” and “liking” are related but not identical. You can keep reaching for something after you no longer enjoy it very much. That makes one question useful: Do I still like what I keep wanting?

Christian practice has long kept fasting and feasting together. You can receive a good thing gladly, and you can leave it alone. Both matter.

Learn what enough looks like

Chesterton makes a memorable distinction while writing about wine:

“Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable… drink when you would be happy without it.”

G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, “Omar and the Sacred Vine”

He contrasts the laughing peasant of Italy with the grey-faced gin drinker in the slum. One drinks as part of a celebration already under way. The other asks the drink to make life tolerable.

The same question applies beyond alcohol. Food, sex, screens, shopping, gaming, work, exercise, and other pleasures can have a fitting place in life or begin to take over more than they should.

The classical name for the virtue involved here is temperance. Aristotle describes virtue as a fitting mean between excess and deficiency. That does not mean doing everything moderately. It means learning what is enough in a particular situation.

Aquinas treats appetite as something to form, not something to hate. Under temperance he places abstinence around food, sobriety around intoxicating drink, and chastity around sexual desire.

Gluttony, in this tradition, is broader than quantity. Appetite can become disordered in what you seek, when you seek it, how urgently you seek it, and how much authority you give it. Sobriety protects judgment from intoxication. Chastity means refusing to treat another person as an object for your appetite.

For some people and some substances, enough is none. Temperance is not compulsory moderation. It is the ability to receive a pleasure without being ruled by it.

Pay attention while the good thing is happening

A good experience can pass without making much impression. You eat while reading something else. You walk somewhere beautiful while checking your phone. Someone you love says something funny and you are already thinking about what comes next.

Psychologists use the word savoring for the ways people attend to and appreciate positive experience. In practice, it is not complicated. Slow down enough to notice. Notice what you see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. Share it with someone. Remember it afterward.

Savoring is different from maximizing. Maximizing keeps asking whether the experience could be better: a better restaurant, a better vacation, a better picture, a more memorable plan. Comparison pulls attention away from what is actually happening.

Brené Brown describes another obstacle: foreboding joy. Something good happens, and you begin imagining how it might go wrong. Instead of enjoying the moment, you rehearse the disappointment you fear.

Gratitude can bring your attention back to what is actually happening, without requiring you to pretend that nothing bad could happen.

You also have to let the experience end. The meal ends. The weekend ends. The season changes. You do not have to keep a good thing from ending in order to have enjoyed it well.

Compulsion does the opposite. Instead of paying attention to what you are enjoying, you start thinking about getting more.

Do something that does not have to become an achievement

Adults can turn nearly any pastime into a project. A game becomes a measure of skill. A hobby needs a goal. An afternoon spent making something feels wasted unless the result is good. Improvement can be satisfying, but it is not the only reason to do something.

Play allows experimentation without demanding a useful result. You can make something badly, change the rules, follow an idea that may go nowhere, or laugh at a mistake. Thomas Aquinas included recreation and play in his account of the virtues; a serious life has room for both.

Jung gives this freedom a further significance in Psychological Types:

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.”

C. G. Jung, Psychological Types, CW 6, §197

Jung was writing about creativity. We cannot reason our way to every discovery in advance. Sometimes we need to work with an idea, an image, a sound, or a material before we know what it might become. Play gives imagination room to try things that deliberate planning would dismiss too early.

Play is trust embodied. You accept that you do not know exactly what will happen or whether you will be good at it. That is part of the pleasure.

Watching a show or listening to music can certainly be enjoyable. But make room for pleasures that involve doing something yourself: movement, making, conversation, humor, improvisation, and shared games.

Connection is more than processing problems

Long-term relationships come with a lot of practical matters. Who is picking up the child? Did the bill get paid? What did the doctor say? When are we leaving? What are we going to do about the thing we keep arguing about?

Those conversations matter. They are not the whole of closeness.

People also connect by cooking, wandering, teasing, building, watching, listening, playing, competing, telling stories, sitting outside, and pointing things out to each other. Sometimes affection sounds like, “Come look at this.”

Enjoying something together may require very little explanation. Hand someone a bite. Play them a song. Ask them to come along. Call them outside because the sky looks strange.

Some relationships need more honest processing, not less. But when every interaction has to identify a problem, name a feeling, reach an agreement, or become a growth exercise, the relationship can start to feel like another project.

Good things need protected space

Urgent things are good at taking over the calendar. Emails need answers. Repairs need scheduling. People ask for things. Worthy opportunities appear. Time with your spouse, a friend, Sabbath, music, or a walk can usually be postponed.

If they must wait until everything else is finished, they may never happen.

“Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.”

Proverbs 4:23, ESV

In Scripture, the heart is more than emotion. It names the inner life from which desire, judgment, worship, attention, and action arise. Proverbs tells you to guard it because what you give your attention and desire to shapes how you live.

John Flavel built an entire work of spiritual direction around this verse. He hears urgency in the command:

“Keep, keep; set double guards, your hearts will be gone else.”

John Flavel, Keeping the Heart

For Flavel, the heart is like a garrison that needs guarding from pressures outside and within.

Robert Moore uses a different image for much the same practical problem. He calls the place of intimacy, beauty, play, tenderness, creativity, grief, and pleasure a garden. His point is direct: if you do not protect that space, other demands will take it.

For Moore, the Warrior protects the garden. Genesis gives him a fitting image: cherubim and a flaming sword guarding Eden. The Warrior stands at the gate, not to suppress the Lover, but to keep work, obligation, and distraction from taking over the time and attention that intimacy, play, and pleasure require.

In Sabbath as Resistance, Walter Brueggemann reads the Exodus story against Pharaoh’s demand for endless production. Sabbath becomes a refusal to live by that demand.

“Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.”

Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance, p. 45

You can leave Egypt and still live as though every available hour must be used to produce, acquire, or respond. Sabbath is more than a short break that prepares you to work harder. It challenges the belief that work must govern the whole of life.

Protecting garden time is usually practical. Put it on the calendar. Decline the appointment. Turn off the device. Leave a chore until tomorrow. Say no to one more worthy obligation because you have already decided to protect that time.

The garden needs limits inside it too. A meal ends. A weekend ends. A season ends. If you cannot stop, the pleasure is no longer simply something you enjoy.

Enjoy what is good while it is here, and let it end when it is over.

Choose one good thing and give it a place

Do not redesign your leisure life. Choose one ordinary good already within reach—a meal, a walk, an hour with someone you love, a piece of music, a game, a project, or time outside—and make enough room to actually enjoy it.

Seven days of practice

1. Day 1: Notice one ordinary pleasure you usually rush through. Stay with it a little longer than usual.
2. Day 2: Spend ten minutes doing something that has no productive defense.
3. Day 3: Use the Afterward Test on your usual evening relief: did you return to your life more present, or merely lose awareness of it for a while?
4. Day 4: Let one pleasure end while it is still good. Notice what it is like not to chase the next increment.
5. Day 5: Play. Choose something low-stakes enough that you can improvise, fail, or look foolish without consequence.
6. Day 6: Guard one patch of garden time. Put it on the calendar and refuse one reasonable encroachment.
7. Day 7: Stop producing and consuming for a while. Let something remain unfinished. Use the worksheet to decide what garden space deserves protection next week.