I’m currently hard at work with my students on a project with a deadline. We’re all busily writing code, creating virtual objects and creatures, testing ideas and theories, and conducting experiments of one sort or another.
When people come to the lab we excitedly show them what we’re working on, and as soon as those people have left, we all dive back in and keep working — often well into the night.
When you’re caught up in such a scene, you can fail to realize, in the moment, just how much fun you’re having. After all, this is hard work, and sometimes — when things simply refuse to work for hours on end — it can get frustrating.
Yet when I think back over my life, and the times I remember with greatest fondness, many of those times were situations just like this — when there was some hard and challenging work to do, and a team of hardy souls came together to got it done.
William Wordsworth once said that the origin of poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility”. Maybe that is true of experience in general. In the moment, during the peak times of our lives, we rarely realize just how much joy we are experiencing.
Until, perhaps, some time later, maybe long after the project is done, when time has turned memory into poetry.
Yes!
I’ve also found that some of my most meaningful friendships have developed with people while working hard together on a challenging project with a goal that matters to all of us. In addition to having fun together in the work, I think it is easier to let your guard down and be vulnerable in such situations, which makes it easier to get to know people and let them get to know you. If you are working with a talented group of people (as I’m sure you are) you get to really appreciate their talents in action.
Come to think of it, the relationships that develop in these situations are an important contributor to the joy for me.
I agree!!!