Enjoying the Journey
Extracting the essence of life
John Keats wrote,
Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!1
He also says:
Call the world if you Please “The vale of Soul-making.”2
That is, the world is a kind of school for building something. Yes, there are pains and struggle, but it’s all part of the training.
This is certainly a very useful way of taking life, and for being able to see beyond the cares of ordinary life, which sometimes can seem larger than they are. But what about enjoying life? Is that allowed too, in the process of this “Soul-making”? Perhaps it’s even necessary. If things are just left to chance, then one day, or one minute, I may enjoy things, and another day the circumstances are such that I may hate them. Can I take the trouble to deliberately enjoy things, no matter what? Can I look a situatio…