You Don't Have to Make Everything You Love Useful
You can keep things just for you.
There is something mildly depressing about how quickly we turn pleasure into a project.
We start reading because we love books, and before long, someone suggests a reading challenge. We enjoy walking, and suddenly we are counting steps. We start cooking because we love feeding people, and someone asks whether we could monetize our recipes.
Apparently, enjoying something is no longer enough. We must show that our enjoyment produces a measurable return.
I have absolutely no objection to ambition. I love an interesting project, and I appreciate women who are serious about their work. I have built businesses, taught classes, organized communities, and spent considerable portions of my life trying to make things happen.
I am suspicious of the idea that every interesting thing about us ought to be put to work.
A woman should be able to learn Italian because she likes the sound of it. She should be able to spend an afternoon studying Renaissance courtesans without turning that knowledge into a lecture, a podcast, or a marketable expertise.
She should be able to collect beautiful glassware, rearrange her furniture, cultivate an outrageously impractical garden, or take a class in something she has absolutely no intention of mastering.
Some pleasures become significantly less pleasurable the minute we begin evaluating our performance.
I think this is especially worth examining for women who have spent decades being useful to other people.
We know how to anticipate needs, solve problems, keep things moving, and make ourselves indispensable.
Many of us have become so accomplished at usefulness that we hardly recognize an experience as worthwhile unless somebody benefits from it.
Even our leisure becomes productive. We meditate to manage stress. We exercise to extend our lives. We take vacations to recover enough energy to return to work.
There are perfectly good reasons to do all those things, of course. But I wonder how much pleasure we surrender when we insist that it justify itself.
Beauty is a perfectly legitimate reason to do something.
Curiosity is a perfectly legitimate reason.
Desire, amusement, fascination, and the exquisite pleasure of doing something simply because it delights you are all perfectly legitimate reasons.
You are allowed to develop interests that lead nowhere in particular. You are allowed to become fascinating in ways that will never improve your résumé. You are allowed to have a rich interior life that nobody else gets to evaluate.
In fact, I suspect that some of the most interesting parts of a woman's life begin when she stops asking what an experience will accomplish and starts paying attention to whether she actually wants it.
There is an entire world available to a woman who no longer requires every beautiful thing to earn its keep.
