IN PURSUIT OF PLEASURE

Text back. Do a headstand in Yoga. Be early. Learn to love greens. Care for my skin. Read More. Visit more galleries. Do a painting class. Re-connect with old friends.

The list goes on for two and a half pages. I have been working on it for a week. I love the new year. I love the new diary. I love the idealism of the new chapter. I love that a great display of fireworks can convince you to break bad habits and transform yourself into the new you, seemingly overnight.

Perhaps that is why scrapping the list is such a big deal. In this year's new monogrammed diary, I have drawn lines through my neat cursive record of resolutions, in favour of one BIG, deceivingly easy goal.

I am devoting myself to having a lovely time. Yes, my one ‘resolution’ for 2020 is to pursue pleasure. To really enjoy. I too am baffled at how something so seemingly lovely and easy can be defined as a ‘resolution’. But, there you have it. Like so many, I have been fooled by the devil whose greatest trick has been convincing us that hard work is somehow godly. That putting friends, family and a good old jolly after a never-ending to-do list is the right order of things.

We a generation of overachievers have turned our breakfasts into content, our jogs into marathons, drinks into networking, relaxing into refueling. It seems that at some point, maybe when our hobbies became our side hustles, we forgot to just have hobbies at all. We make things happen and we make things happen fast.

The irony of me resolving to “pursue pleasure” when my day-job is to build a pyjama company that is dedicated to making products precisely for that purpose is not lost on me. But if I am struggling with it as someone whose business and livelihood has been built on the pleasure of eating breakfast in a two-piece pyjama suit, then it must be felt more widely, right?

I don’t think the fireworks have the magic to calm all of the nerves, relieve all the pressure or stop all the anxieties, but they have made me take a second to look over my shoulder and realise the risk of them taking over. The new diary has inspired me to write this email. The New Year has given me a renewed sense of purpose. I am excited to take on 2020 and to keep our ever-growing to-do list focussed on the things that help us, the busy generation, slow down and pursue pleasure. Just because we can. 

HELPING THE PURSUIT

Golden Gaytimes. The best Aussie Ice-cream in history. Reminding me of the joy of sugar and cream.

The Happiness Lab Podcast.  Joel says it sounds a bit woo woo, but the host has transformed a course she taught at Harvard into a series about what it actually takes to 'be happy' and I think it's great. Just push through the first eppy.

In Praise of Mediocrity. A New York Times piece that I found myself saying HERE HERE to over and over again. 

The  Editors Letter of Elle Magazine. I love Farrah's take on the New Year and taking it slow. "Pleasure and satisfaction is most fully appreciated in the small steps towards success that it is in the final denouement of triumph".

Greys Anatomy. Yep. I admit it. It's a great pleasure. No thinking required. No riddles. No politics. Just doctors saving lives with some great one-liners. Thank you Shonda Rhimes. 

Celeste Barber on Instagram. She makes me giggle out loud!!