What are we doing here?

What if we made an effort toward pleasure—toward play and fun and celebration and joy? What if we did it every day?

EnJOY is a practice, a place to share the good stuff, a record, a celebration of it.

I send out bits of delight. Sometimes it’s a moment in time, captured from the day. It may be a poem, a photo, an idea, thought, experience—or it could be an interview with someone who seems particularly adept at joy, or something I’ve read about pleasure.

It’s all collected, like pretty shells from a beach, to make you think deeper about the good in your life. To help see and appreciate things anew, to cultivate a bit of wonder. Not because life is easy or always full of flowers—but because it isn’t.
(More about that here).

And you can share your daily moments of delight in the comments on the post. I’d love to read them. Let’s crowdsource what brings us joy.

Marcel Proust once wrote: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes."

Maybe we don’t need new, better lives, maybe we need to better cultivate—to see and appreciate—what is already here. Maybe we need to make a point of it, a record to capture and share.

That is what enJOY is all about.

Thanks for being here, I hope you’ll join us.

Who am I?

A psychic once told me I had two F-words in my life—words I was too scared and embarrassed to speak aloud. They were: faith and fun.

She wasn’t wrong.

For years I shirked having fun. Sure, I did some cool things around the edges, but fun wasn’t the point of it. I needed to be responsible. Things were hard and I had to do my part. And underneath it all, I wasn’t sure I even deserved good things. Maybe they were only for other people?

I don’t believe that anymore.

I’m not always sure what the difference is between play and joy, happiness, fun, delight, and pleasure—these days I dump them all in a big pot I call the good stuff.

This site, these posts, is a way of fostering the good stuff—planning it, noticing it, relishing it. Because it turns out that good stuff breeds like rabbits in the night. Good stuff does actually beget more good stuff. Who knew?

I’m on an adventure to figure out how much good stuff we can make. I hope you’ll join me. Let’s make it a collaborative art project. Good stuff is almost always magnified when shared.

I have another newsletter that is much more serious—about big, important things and how we might fix the world. (You can see why I need to make good stuff; it balances out the hard and serious).

And I have an official bio and list of my books here.

But mostly, in large and small ways, I’m working to cultivate delight. Because, when you stop to notice it, the world really is beautiful.
And these days there is only one f-word in my life.

Thanks for being here. I hope you’ll join us.

—Tara