Delaying Joy

I only went to the kindergarten about 5 times altogether. Other than these isolated occasions, I was kept at home until the age of 7. Even these few visits, however, have offered me crucial insights. Here is an example. (Long-time readers will recognize the story and will be glad to see the solution).

This will be impossible to believe, but until adolescence I hated food. Just being in the vicinity of food made me want to vomit. There was, however, this variety of sprats canned in tomato sauce which were pretty much the only food I loved.

Kindergarten was torture to me because people there tried making me eat. Once, however, I looked at the plate of food we were offered for lunch and realized I was in luck: among other things, there were my favorite canned sprats.

So I are everything on the plate except the sprats. This uncharacteristic amount of food made me throw up. My grandfather came to take me home.

“This is very strange,” he said. “I bought these sprats and brought them to the kindergarten because I know you like them. Why did you eat everything but them?”

There was, of course, a reason for my strange behavior. As a child, I didn’t feel in control of my life. I especially didn’t feel in control of my enjoyments. Children have to wait for others to sanction and organize their moments of joy. So when I saw these sprats on a plate in front of me, I found a rare opportunity to decide when and how the enjoyment would happen. Eating the sprats would kill that opportunity finally to experience control.

I remembered this story when I was trying to figure out why I kept delaying my work on my research, an activity I enjoy like none other. I would wake up in the morning, anticipating a joyous day filled with research. But first, of course, I had to answer emails, grade homework, plan classes, then answer the emails I received while I planned classes, then resolve the urgent issue a student brought to my attention, then pay bills, have lunch, answer emails, etc.

In the meanwhile, the research was right there and I was just about to start working on it.

And then the day would end.

This went on for years. I was always just about to start this enormously enjoyable activity, which was research, but somehow never really got to start it.

Until I realized: research is sprats! I’m doing the same thing I did at five: delaying enjoyment as a way of ensuring I’m in control of my life. And the real paradox was that I kept robbing myself of control by these efforts.

I complained about this “research as sprats” phenomenon in April of 2011 here on the blog. At that time, I still had no idea how to handle this problem. It is only recently that I finally stopped looking for control in these self-defeating ways.