“We are all just a car crash, a diagnosis, an unexpected phone call, a newfound love, or a broken heart away from becoming a completely different person. How beautifully fragile are we that so many things can take but a moment to alter who we are forever?” // Samuel Decker Thompson

I can’t put it much better than Samuel Decker did — life is indeed beautifully fragile.

To acknowledge the fragility and beauty of life, however, is not to emerge triumphant, seizer of days — achiever of destinies. To acknowledge the fragility and beauty of life is merely to take a small, albeit important, step back — to stand on a desk.

After taking this step, we might feel like we’re making real progress — rescued from our Nihilistic indifference by the direct acknowledgment of the depth and intricacies of the beauty that characterizes our existence. The moment we glimpse that which lies beyond the confines of our previous conceptions is often the very same moment we are confronted with our most formidable obstacle yet — the paradox of enjoyment.

The more you try to enjoy something, the less you enjoy it.

To try to enjoy something is an oxymoron. True enjoyment is effortless. Maybe not in preparation, but certainly in execution (if I dare reduce the act of achieving enjoyment — the finest embodiment of living — to a name as dull as “execution”).

Word choice aside (for now), someone asked me this week if I had any advice for her as she rounded the corner into her final stretch of college — the coveted “senior spring semester” (say that five times fast). She wanted to know if I had any sage advice for how to get the most out of those final, fleeting months of college before the “real world” beckoned, in all of its terrifying glory.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I do recall having a momentary out of body experience — glimpsing my previous self rolling his eyes at the words coming out of my current self’s mouth — a gesture of utter exasperation from a version of myself bound to the confines of my mind only by time itself.

How could current Jarred take himself seriously after saying, “The only way to enjoy these next few months is to stop trying to enjoy these next few months” previous Jarred wondered, brimming with contempt?

On the surface, my answer sounds like a pathetic attempt to appear profound. And while I can’t completely shirk this (almost entirely) self-imposed accusation in good faith, I like to think current Jarred’s answer at least attempted to get at a problem that (I am fairly certain) has been plaguing human beings alike for quite some time now.

To be clear, when I told this person, we’ll call her Jane, to “stop trying to enjoy” the next few months, I didn’t mean to literally stop making an effort to give herself opportunities to experience joy. I definitely don’t think that would be a good idea. I’m a big proponent of putting yourself in a position to win — engineering serendipity. The “stop trying” part of my profoundly not profound response was entirely directed at Jane’s experiential self, not her planning self (if you’ll allow me to make such crude and arbitrary distinctions between inner modes of being). My answer was an unrefined attempt to convey the absolute necessity of removing the layer of thought and desire that eternally lies between us and enjoyment of the activities we so carefully choose to partake in.

I won’t speak for everyone. Scratch that — I won’t speak for anyone. But most of my fondest memories come from times when I was fully immersed in an activity — momentarily freed from the eternally annoying (and frustratingly well-intentioned) part of myself who so badly wants Jarred to enjoy things. The self-defeating embodiment of the paradox of enjoyment that takes shelter inside of all of us at a very young age, and refuses to leave without a fight. The part of us that does not, cannot, and will not, ever understand that true enjoyment is effortless. Understand that enjoyment is an externality of simply being rather than a meticulously manufactured result of any (self-defeating) effort to engineer it.

Well, I did say last week that the mark of progress is when, what once made you mad, now makes you laugh.

I can’t help but laugh at how angry an answer like the one I gave Jane would have made previous Jarred — college senior Jarred.

Maybe that means I’m making progress. Maybe that means I’m just as lost as ever. Maybe those two things aren’t as mutually exclusive as I’d like to think.

Anyways, here’s to trying less and enjoying more.

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