All my life I have had the habit of liking the idea of things and not the thing itself. Only in recent years am I learning to like something for the thing itself. That means, instead of liking the idea of swimming or the idea of learning French, I am actually swimming and learning French.
It’s nice being in the thick of the action, getting lost and stuck in the substance of things. And what’s nice too, in a perverse way, is all of that other stuff – the challenging, boring, difficult bits, the bits that make you wanna pull your hair out.
Because learning French is pull-your-hair-out hard. It’s really tempting to give it up and go back to liking the idea of learning French and not learning French. But the whole thing is also strangely fun. And I swear it’s the difficult and boring and challenging bits that make it fun.
That’s life for you. I could never understand it. But I’m always excited to be on the ride.