Thoughts of Joy

That's a weird title isn't it ...

Actually this post could go absolutely anywhere. It's mostly inspired by the memes that have sprung up around Marie Kondo and her KonMari method. If something does not bring you joy, remove it from your life. Perhaps a bit extreme when taken to ... extremes but I can see the logic in it. The method is mostly about how to declutter your space but I think it could be applied to other areas as well.

For me, I have a massive amount of clutter in my house. Most of it is Lego. A lot of it is books and cds. There are quite a few movies and magazines too.

I look over at the collection of Lego, dragons and other assorted cute objects in front of the telly and it brings me joy. I look at the set of game boxes to my right and remember the joy of playing (most of) those games in their day. Behind me are the books and the cds. Gotta admit, the cd collection is a bit redundant now and could be hidden away somewhere. The ones I want to keep listening to got copied over to the latest laptop and the albums I don't listen to ... didn't.

So in a sense, I have eliminated those albums that no longer bring joy from the collection. There's a good few games too which I stay away from temporarily or permanently because they do not bring joy, either in that instant or because it's a more fundamental thing. I'm currently in a campaign of XCom and there is definitely more a sense of terror than joy from that at the moment. I've been sticking with it though for ... just ... one ... more ... mission.

Oh and Bradford got a bit old between the two games :

I'm still fully engaged in that XCom campaign but I think I could quickly drop it and go straight into the next one. There are some big flaws in the core of the strategic gameplay which make it unnecessarily harder than it should be. A lot of that is fixed in XCom 2 which is a much more satisfying game to play.

Sometimes we hang around in patterns or in books even or experiences that as the nice Japanese lady might say, do not bring joy.

So why do we do it ? Why do we slog through the book that we're not enjoying, the course that we're training on or the game that feels far more grind than fun ? A lot of it is that we're looking for the payoff at the end. We want to know the end of the story, we want those new skills or we want to experience all that the game has to offer.

I had a similar question with the cricket all those years ago. I was still having fun running full pelt around the place like a madman and contributing with the batting too. But it hit home when I was having to leave the running around to the fielders further out because I knew I wouldn't be able to do much with the ball if I did catch up with it. Plus I had the whole concussion thing that heavily damaged my reactions in that final year. The first two games of that season were played in poor conditions as well, which prompted "Why am I still playing this ?" that combined with the muscular pain lasting for about a week after games by that point.

It was a lovely game to finish on though. Plus the decision to quit was kinda forced by my legs becoming much worse soon after the game making it impossible to play.

However, even without that serious illness with my outsides, I think I'd have been calling time on the cricket. At the time, my confidence in my coordination had been shattered by the affects of the concussion suffered in the nets before the season started, although I did not connect that until much later.

I'm (half!) watching an episode of Stargate SG-1 at the moment and ... this series still brings joy. This is the first episode of season 9, where they kinda reboot it after what feels now like a heavily rushed season 8 where a huge amount happens in that series. An influx of new characters led by Ben Browder and Claudia Black joining up again after Farscape leads to a much needed freshness to the season. (The less said about the enemy the better !)

I'm happy to watch that again, with the counterpoint being the various DC universe programmes which got deleted earlier in the year. They no longer brought joy. I was grinding through them out of a sense of getting to the end. I figured it wasn't worth grinding through to the end of those stories any more. I've also just dropped NCIS but that's for different reasons.

We have limited time. If you are not enjoying the activity you are involved in, ask why you are doing that. Is there a better use of your time ?

And I do enjoy a good bit of chilling out and just relaxing these days.

Chat with good people is good too, although I tend to drift away from groups and conversations that are not Joy. Some people give me joy to be around, some do not. I prefer to talk to the people that bring joy. I also like to do things for those people too, like sending fun pictures, sending daft comments, other stuff like that.

If the people who give joy get joy from what I do, that makes me happy too.

I'm not sure if the latest book I'm reading is giving joy (Kim Stanley Robinson 2312) but it is giving a promising, intriguing start so far. I'm not so sure about The Expanse books. They had a brilliant start but I'm not sure where they're going. Book 7 definitely struggled to Bring Joy, as did Book 3. It was notable that Book 3 was savagely cut down for the tv series.

I'll stick with The Expanse series but I don't think I'll be rereading them like I have done with books like The Martian several times. That book definitely does Bring Joy.

I hope this post and the others you've hopefully read from me bring you joy in their own way. I think I've taken up enough of your time for today though, go do something fun !

Oh and .... catalyst for post. The old ship, the Kerr Avon Forever, did not bring joy. Although it was very profitable. That ship is the Commander Fuzzy, the smallest of the Federation ships and it has already fed upon the broken wrecks of many (several) enemy starships. It has definitely brought joy.

Although not tonight, cos I went to the Mall, had joy from wandering around the newly reopened HMV, remembered the joy from watching Michael Palin's series on seeing his book about a ship called the Erebus. Nearly bought that too.

Tired now, watching Stargates, about to dive into the music and then it'll be chilling out to video watching :-D.

Have a great evening everyone.