All about Walt Whitman

Commitment and Pleasure: is it possible to join them?

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Today I was exchanging e-mails with a friend about work, and we realized how much we have been enjoying our work lately, especially our endeavors on the internet. And, as the Led Zeppelin song goes, “It makes me wonder”. And this wondering made me look back ten years before now, when I learned a great lesson from another great friend of mine, Austro Queiroz. Actually, he is more than a friend, he is a Master to us all who have the pleasure and honor to know him. If you are interested in finding out more about him, check his works on the web.

But let me tell you about the lesson that he taught me. It is all about Commitment and Pleasure. He explained to us at that time that we all think about commitment with no connection to pleasure, that is, we live our lives with our commitments and pleasures, but usually we see them as completely separated. Commitment is obligation, and has nothing to do with pleasure. So we live bound by commitment, and usually with no pleasure. The commitment is so heavy that it becomes obligation, and obligation makes us feel anxious and exhausted and stressed, and whenever we think of what we have to do, we start to not like it any more.

This thought leads us to the other concept, pleasure. The problem with commitment turned into mere obligation is that it restricts our creativity, our freedom of imagination, our natural happiness, and it ends up restricting our pleasure in doing things. This is why I said that we all think of commitment as separated from pleasure, as two states of mind which cannot be joined (it is not a mere coincidence if this reminds us of duality). Even when we start working at a place or with something for pleasure, as time goes by, it may became a bore, and the pleasure goes away.

My friend then taught me that we need to search for both commitment and pleasure in our lives. That we must not worry for the time being about the fact that we do not have pleasure in our duties, obligation, responsibilities, in short, commitment to things. He said that what we really need is to seek for both, and try to establish where in our lives we find commitment and where we find pleasure. And use what we find as parameters for these attitude and feeling. And when we have clear standards of commitment and pleasure in us, we may proceed to the next step: establish our ultimate goal, which is to learn how to join commitment to pleasure.

First of all, I am not talking about mere physical pleasure or instant pleasure. I am talking lasting pleasure. Secondly, this is not something that we achieve overnight. Naturally, those who already know what this means do not need to continue reading. This is for people who have not attained this stage of relationship with one’s self, that is, people who still see commitment as something apart from pleasure. So, do not take sudden action, because this requires thinking and re-thinking our lives in the long term, simply because we can not change habits, customs and beliefs that have taken years or decades to settle themselves in our minds. As most of these habits or beliefs are unconscious, they demand time and effort to be gotten rid of. However, difficult as it may seem, it is not impossible to do. It only requires commitment to one’s self, to one’s life, to one’s purpose in life.

As I said before, this is not about quitting your job now and finding a new one tomorrow. If you do not know what you are doing and do not know what you like and want from your life, you might change jobs ten times a year, and you will never be satisfied. This is about thinking deeply on what commitment you already have and what things and activities you derive pleasure from. It does not matter what they are, you only need to know for sure these things for now. Because when you know them and start making this clear and clear every day, you will be able to establish a higher goal, which is to begin thinking of how commitment and pleasure can be joined.

That’s why I said I am not talking about simple physical pleasures. I am talking about the pleasure you feel when you do things that make you feel happy, joyful, free, creative, the things that you do or perform as if you were playing, or even when you are actually playing, as a hobby, for example (there are many examples of people who turned their hobbies into a business over the Internet; but the problem is: how to get there!). It is as if your job were your toy, a toy that you never get tired of playing with. In this case, you might work all day and never feel tired. It is rather the opposite, the more you work, the more pleasure you feel, the more creative you are and the more you want to work.

So, the more something happens, the more it is likely to happen; the more you do something, the more you want to do it The more you produce, the more you create, the more you want to do it and the more you can do it. This is the stage when a problem becomes inspiration for solutions, not a burden that you have to break your back to carry or break your brains to solve. Actually, at this stage, the problem is the solution, because a problem is a source for many solutions. (Naturally, if you are doing something that you do not like, the opposite will happen: the more you do it, the less you want to do it. in this case, the rule is: the more of something, the less of it, that is, the less it is necessary of it.)

Then, when you find what you really like to do, something that is a source of endless pleasure for you, you have established your pleasure parameter. The same you do with the activities you have commitment to. At this point, you can balance your life, because you compensate your dislike in doing something with the pleasure that you have in your rewarding activity(ies). However, we do not stop here. In fact, this is just the beginning. This is what I did ten years ago. From then on, I started to do what you can try now: I began to work on the idea of joining commitment to pleasure, that is, to project a future when I would have commitment to the activities in which I found pleasure.

For example, in 1995, sometime before I learned what I am now describing here, I asked myself: will I be able to live without poetry? Will I be able to live without translating poetry or reading poetry? It took me 10 years to answer that question, and the answer was obviously “No!”. This is what I realized in 2004 and 2005, when I decided to go back to university to continue the poetic re-creation of Leaves of Grass into Portuguese, which I have been doing since then. By the end of this year, I will have finished my doctorate, which includes the translation of about 130 pages of poetry from the Leaves. When I did my Master’s course, I translated “Song of Myself”, “Children of Adam” and “Calamus”. I am telling some of the things I have done in my life to show that it requires sincerity, honesty, frankness, and the courage to live the life that we want to really be true to ourselves and change what we are doing for the better, for something bigger and greater.

As a result of my self-questioning and the lesson I learned from my friend ten years ago, I decided to join commitment and pleasure, that is, to have commitment to the types of activities that fulfill me, that enrich me, that make me happy and that make me feel happy in sharing them with others. This is another aspect of having commitment to pleasurable activities: we naturally tend to share them with others, as I am doing here, letting the world know what I do for pleasure. The commitment we have to something we like makes us do it well, because we want to do it well, to pursue perfection in our undertakings. Writing this here is as rewarding for me as writing a poem or translating a poem.

However, I cannot say that all this change in my life was easy. It took many years to be achieved, and it requires persistence, obstinacy, adherence to our most profound will, our deepest desires, so that we can finally feel that we have at last realized something, as once I heard an athlete saying this after winning a gold medal at the Olympics at Athens 2004. But I say to anyone, it can be done. It is hard; it takes time and a lot of effort, but is worth while. I quit my teaching job in 2002, and I spent 3 years struggling to survive, until I started to realize what I really wanted for my life. And then I went back to poetry, university, the books, and writing. Now I know I cannot live without writing. It does not even matter what I will do in the future, as long as it involves writing, it is fine for me. Thus, it is up to you to pursue your dreams, your ambitions, to be committed to what fills you with pleasure, to what makes your soul vibrate. Search for what makes you vibrate; what makes your heart beat like a drum. Listen to your heart, because the heart never lies!

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