townx

How do you decide what you enjoy? What does "enjoy" mean, anyway?

Which leads me to the related questions: Why do we engage with art? What do we get out of it?

I am quite obsessed with this as an issue. I spend a huge amount of time and money on music. I love music. I can talk about my favourite bands all day. But my engagement with it is shallow, in terms of how well I can talk about it: I don't understand music in a technical way, even though I think it engages me both intellectually and emotionally. What am I getting out of it?

(I love dancing, by the way. You might not think that. I rarely go to clubs. But I absolutely love dancing. I used to go to loads of club nights at university and just immerse myself in the music, especially the beats and basslines. Now it's restricted to the kitchen while I'm washing up. I don't really like dancing at weddings or parties, mind.)

And recently I've got back into reading science fiction books. I love science fiction, too. Again, though, my engagement is shallow: I know about its history, general themes, I can recognise writers and styles, but I don't theorise deeply about its deeper meanings. I'm happy to just chat about it. (Though I did write a dissertation on JG Ballard and William Burroughs once.)

On the non-art side, I enjoy gardening a lot. I can lose myself when I'm out in the garden, pruning, weeding, sowing, just looking and smelling and hearing the garden around me. I think that is one of my purest enjoyments; I particularly enjoy it because I don't feel I have to intellectualise it. Maybe that's my problem with engaging with art, I think too much about it. Isn't that the point?

I've excluded familial relationships and friendships from this monologue: I don't so much enjoy these, as experience joy (and pain) because of them. Is this the same as enjoyment?

I've also excluded computers. As I work with them all the time, I have a love/hate relationship with them. I can't make a blanket statement that I enjoy programming. Often I don't. Sometimes I find it intensely frustrating and limiting. Other times I find it mind numbing. Then other times I get so engrossed that hours pass without me moving to eat or go to the toilet. It's one of those things.

I suppose what I'm getting at is: I don't feel I have a deep love for any hobby or pastime. Perhaps rather than "love" I should say I don't feel consumed by anything, or driven, or ambitious, or even that passionate. Should I be? Does it matter if I'm not? Is it just the time of year? Maybe I watch people on TV culture shows too much and think I should be able to intelligently discuss my experience of the world, the same way the participants on those programmes do. Perhaps I should just relax.

What do you enjoy, by the way?

(Now I've written all this, I'm not even sure why I did it. Perhaps it's because I've spent the whole day listening to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, a band I love and have done for 20 odd years. It made me wonder what it is about music that I like so much. And why I place so much importance on a person's music taste as a measure of their personality. I probably shouldn't, but I do.)