Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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True enjoyment is not in success
Are you an expert in a particular field or are you a specialist at any activity who can achieve the highest standards possible? That's 'part one' of my question; the other part is, "Are you at your happiest when doing it?"
Strangely, it is often the case that people who become an absolute expert in an activity do not necessarily enjoy themselves at it. And the converse is often true; people who are not experts in a field can often gain a great deal of enjoyment from applying themselves to it to the best of their ability. Now why is this?
It is likely that you can think of a number of people who have had a keen interest in a field, maybe when they were young and eventually they trained to become a professional. I can think of a couple of professional photographers who both started as keen enthusiasts as teenagers, joined clubs and threw themselves into their hobby. When they eventually became professional they ceased to find the same level of enjoyment as they did when it was simply for their own amusement. One said to me that now he's professional, he never takes a camera on holiday. Yet now, with many more years experience, awards and successful commissions to his name, he ceases to be as enthusiastic.
I have often been asked if I sell my own hand-made black and white photographs that I produce in my darkroom, and my answer is "Not if I can help it." By turning it into a form of business, one ceases to enjoy the process to the same degree. I love doing photography, particularly I enjoy working towards a standard that eludes me.
The enjoyment is often lost when we do it through obligation to others and also if we are lucky enough to get to the top of our field. This is because if we get to the top of our field, there is nothing more to be achieved.
The last thing you really want if you wish to be happy is 100% successful.
If you are so successful and master of your craft, there is no further demands that stretch you and nothing more to work towards. Simply to become a human machine that produces remarkable results, be it in music, art, sport or any other field, soon loses its shine and we become less satisfied. The young Maestro violinist Maxim Vengerov has recently quit performing concerts to work with child prodigies and to conduct. Having become an absolute master technician and superb musical artist, he has said that the constant treadmill of performing concerts around the world and performing like a hamster no longer appeals. He now seeks his enjoyment in other fields where he is stretched and is looking for greater perfection than he currently achieves.
As humans we love to be stretched. We like a challenge, but the challenge should not be so great that we do not achieve any level of success at all. We love to make progress and achieve little step after little step. This way we feel a sense of achievement in a field that is demanding, yet still offers more for which to work. It is probably during such activities when we are lost in our own absorption, working to achieve higher standards than we currently manage and also experiencing little improvements and reward, that we are at our happiest. When we are truly happy, we are probably not aware of it until after the occasion and we can think back and realise that we've been very happily absorbed for many hours in an activity that is demanding beyond our level of expertise yet still we manage to make progress and some rewarding results.
These thoughts bring to mind a quote by Sir Henry Moore, the sculptor...
"The secret of life is to have a task. Something that you devote your entire life to, something to bring everything to, every minute of the day, for your whole life. And the important thing is, it must be something you can't possibly do."
-Henry Moore (1831 - 1895), English painter
