Small Pleasures by The School of Life

Author:The School of Life [Life, The School of]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780993538780
Publisher: The School of Life
Published: 2016-11-01T06:00:00+00:00

35

Pleasant Exhaustion After a Productive Day

It’s 9.45 pm. You put in an extra, late spurt – for supper you had a toasted sandwich at your desk, brushing the occasional crumb from the keyboard while you kept at it. It was difficult. But now it’s done. You’ve made the progress you’d hoped to. Probably, it will all start again in the morning, but you’ll be working off a solid base – it won’t be the familiar scramble to catch up.

You’re worn out. You had to make yourself stick at it – but now you’re glad you did. There’s a gentle ache in the middle of your back. You yawn and turn your neck from side to side; you stretch round and try to massage an awkward spot below your left shoulder blade. In a while you’ll need to head off to bed – but not just yet. It’s nice to linger and spin out the moment of repletion. It’s lovely to saunter about and make a cup of tea or let some wine gurgle from the bottle into a glass. You might flick indifferently through the newspaper. You can’t get engaged: your brain has done its work and shies away from any further effort.

The pleasure we feel after a good but hard day’s work is linked to a positive experience of willpower. It was tempting to break off; you could have put it off until tomorrow (you’ve often done that in the past); you could have become distracted (which is achingly familiar); you could have stayed physically at your desk but actually been fantasising about glamorous apartments in New York or finding out what a TV personality is up to at the moment. But you didn’t. You stuck with the big thing.

It’s also to do with a sense of mastery: in anticipation we slightly feared the task. But we got on top of this tricky thing and we tamed it. There were points when it felt we might not: it was too difficult; a solution seemed elusive; there were too many things we were trying to get right at the same time; a mass of details needed to be reduced to a simple, coherent shape – though it wasn’t at all obvious what this could be. An awkward email needed a tactful but firm response; a refusal had to be delivered without a sting; a criticism needed to be put forward delicately but very clearly. A hunch had to be turned into a proposal – and there’s always a difficult point at which what had, from a distance, seemed like a good idea starts to look much less impressive close up, yet it was onto something … only what exactly? Maybe you had to revise a report and you dreaded unpicking work you had already done and facing the same old issues once again. We’ve been labouring against the normal forces of disintegration. Things that were scattered and messy have been brought together, harmonised, tidied up, elucidated. We’ve done something fundamental. We’ve held back the tide of chaos.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.