The activity you choose for pleasure does not need to become another contest.

GRATITUDE

WHAT THIS MEANS

Hobbies drift toward measurement almost by themselves. The running becomes times, the cooking becomes photographs, the reading becomes a total for the year, and gradually the thing you took up to escape assessment is being assessed. Improvement is enjoyable, but it is not the same as pleasure, and one can quietly eat the other.

Take one thing you do for its own sake and remove the scoring from it for a month. Do not time it, count it or post it. See whether you still want to do it when nobody, including you, is keeping a record of how well it went.

A QUESTION TO SIT WITH

Has a hobby of yours quietly turned into something to win?

MORE IN GRATITUDE & PRESENCE

Free, with nothing to buy inside it.