Doing and Being

If we spend all of our time doing, where is the room for being? We are human beings, after all. We’re not called “human doings.”

How are you nurturing your being?

Being activities are typically prefaced with “enjoying.” Some examples would be enjoying the weather, enjoying a warm cup of coffee, enjoying a walk in the woods.

Doing activities are typically prefaced with “working on.” Examples of this category would be working on email, working on this project, working on planning a vacation.

What is strange is that you could switch activities into another category just by changing the words you use before. Working on planning a vacation should be fun! But if it’s work, then you want to be done with it quickly. When we view it as a task to accomplish, the joy is gone and it’s just another task on our endless to-do list.

“When it’s work, we try to do less. When it’s art, we try to do more.” – Seth Godin

Instead of “working on planning your vacation,” why can’t you be “enjoying planning a vacation?” What it comes down to is that we work on things in order to get to the end goal and we enjoy things because the process is filled with pleasure and appreciation.

My hunch is that if we could shift our perspective a little bit, we could find more things to appreciate and life would stop feeling so much like work.