Changing My Life Right Now: Enthusiasm

I’m here today with a brief, totally uncomprehensive missive on enthusiasm, my friends.

You might need this post if you are:

1. Feeling totally burnt out. (Are the 100 Days of May over yet?!?!)

2. Finding yourself dreaming more and more about some future happy occasion and finding yourself less and less interested in the tasks/projects/work that are currently at hand.

You may remember my experiment this month has been attempting to find 100 Yay’s in May. You can read why I’ve needed this experiment so badly here. The results I can report to you are that I’m up to about 63 and the month is over in 5 days. It’s not 100, but I’m feeling pretty good about this outcome because through doing this experiment I’ve realized:

Finding Yay’s—the things we can appreciate and get excited about in life—is pretty much the point of life. To be fully in my life and appreciating it means I’m killing it in my job of being a human being on this planet.

Photo by Stephanie McCabe on Unsplash

Does this mean I’ve been perfectly enthusiastic every minute of every day? God, no. But, in contemplating and exploring enthusiasm this month, I’ve come to a deeper appreciation for the feeling, as well as a few nuggets of wisdom I thought you’d appreciate:

1. Enthusiasm is important. I loved this definition of enthusiasm: “The function of enthusiasm is to enhance energy and persistence in goal pursuit.”¹ Who doesn’t need “enhanced energy and persistence” to get through life? I definitely needed it to get through the marathon weeks and weekends this month! And here’s Montaigne’s view: “Men are nothing until they are excited.” Having passion and zeal for your life can definitely shift it from feeling like a blah nothing into a spark of something.

2. Choose a word that works for you. Maybe you don’t resonate with the word enthusiasm. There are lots of synonyms to choose from: Eagerness, Ardor, Passion, Zeal, Excitement, Wholeheartedness, Willingness, Commitment. I oscillated between using the words “excited” and “wholehearted” this month. There are a bunch of silly onomatapoetic words available for us to use, too, like: zing, zip, zap, vim, and pep!

3. Enthusiasm is like a sprinkler. When we see a sprinkler in action, all we see is water spraying everywhere. But the source it’s drawing from, and the force that is flinging that water everywhere, is hidden. The well from which we draw our enthusiasm can begin with mere intention. If we set an intention and look around, we can always find something in our lives that’s beautiful, nourishing, or engaging.

   But what I’ve realized this month is that it’s hard to muster the enthusiasm, to fling it out like that sprinkler, without some force. We need energy, which comes from sufficient rest, movement, sunlight, and hydration, to power not only our physical bodies but also the psychological zing, zip, and zap of zeal for our lives.

I worked deliberately this month to try to move my body regularly, get outside a bit more, drink enough water, and rest. I’m pretty sure these indirectly contributed to and made a critical difference in my ability to muster enthusiasm this month.

This quote from Papyrus² helped drive home why it was so important to nourish my enthusiasm in these ways.

If you can’t get enthusiastic about your work, it’s time to get alarmed-something is wrong… No one keeps up his enthusiasm automatically. Enthusiasm must be nourished with new actions, new aspirations, new efforts, new vision. It is one’s own fault if his enthusiasm is gone; he has failed to feed it. If you want to turn hours into minutes, renew your enthusiasm.

Feeding my enthusiasm this month by looking for the Yay’s, has made my May less of a blah blur and more of a sparkling yes! (But I’m also feeling enthusiastic about getting to the end of Maycember!!)

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Recent posts you may have missed:
—> May’s Experiment:

—> This month I got deep with anger. (Maybe anger is the flip side of enthusiasm?) I figured out how to welcome anger, which still feels so so weird to write.

—> This post could also have been the “Changing My Life” post of the month. Rebound Time #ftw!

1. Poggi, I. (2007). Enthusiasm and Its Contagion: Nature and Function. Link

2. Is this a person? Or an actual parchment? Or just a chain stationary store? Google was entirely unhelpful on this subject.