For the month of November I’m participating in a daily gratitude challenge posted by the journaling app that I use, Day One, and here’s today’s prompt:
What brings me joy?
On Sunday I was happy that I had watched the most games that day than I had any previous Sunday and most of the games were decided in the very last minutes of play. That was fun.
Over the past several days I’ve been working on my website, particularly my academic portfolio section. I’m proud of the work that I’ve done over the years as a student, but it’s more than that. As I think about the next chapter of my life, especially in terms of my writing, there’s something fun or satisfying about revisiting all of the different stories and papers I’ve written. The idea of the portfolio was a natural result of my online master’s work where we turned in our assignment via our websites and it became a kind of online filing cabinet where I could or imagined that I could pull up anything that I’d written going all the way back to papers written for my studies at Loyola Marymount in the 1976.
In one of my first teacher-education courses I learned something that really opened the doors to understanding my father a bit better and my own work habits. At Cal State Fullerton, in CHILD325: Middle Childhood the professor described “play” and what constitutes “play” when studying childhood and human behavior: Play is any activity where the goal is not to finish or be done, but the engagement in the activity is its chief purpose. I suddenly understood all of the weekends spent working with my dad and younger brother in the backyard. My dad told my mom that he’d be done “soon,” but soon was just a cover story. He enjoyed pruning the trees and edging the lawn and painting the porch. If he could work in the backyard (and front yard) every day for the rest of his life, he would have been fine and quite happy. I got no enjoyment for the sweat and toil and criticism at a job poorly done, but I wasn’t there for my own benefit. I thought it was torture, but good ol’ dad was playing. It just looked like work to the uninformed observer. I bring this story up because this is my approach to writing and just working at my computer(s). There is no “done” in the equation, just pauses and stretches and briefly walking away to stretch and grab something to eat. I’m playing when I’m at my computer(s), that it looks like I’m working is just the same cover story my dad used in the backyard.
I focused on my academic portfolio in part because I wanted it to be presentable as part of my resume, but really, I’m just playing, finding different ways to present my work. I’m just playing and that gives me joy.
