I’m Engaged!
No, not that kind. I mean the “absorbed” kind, where something interests you so much that you forget everything except what you’re doing. You forget about yourself, you forget about time. All that exists is the activity you’re involved with, because you’re fully involved.
“Engagement” is a word I run across a lot as I dig into the academic research about happiness. It turns out that it’s one of the biggies for producing satisfaction in a person’s life. I looked the word up in the dictionary the other day and was amused to find that it means both “pledged to be married,” and “entered into conflict with”—as in engaging the enemy.
But the more I thought about it, the more fitting the word seemed for the process that the happiness researchers are talking about. When they use the term “engaged,” they’re not talking about a passive activity, like watching TV, or daydreaming—however pleasant those activities may sometimes be. They’re talking about someone tackling an activity that’s both attractive and challenging, about something that requires your focused attention because doing it well requires exercising your skills. In other words, you marry yourself to it and sometimes fight with it all at the same time. It could be anything from creating a scrapbook to running a race, or solving a math problem, or baking the perfect chocolate cake.
Usually, we become engaged in an activity when it’s in service of a goal that’s meaningful for us. We want to do the activity well because it matters to us. For instance, I happen to be a photography enthusiast. I’ve looked at the world through a camera’s lens since I was a little kid. And I take pictures for the joy it gives me. But recently, I added a challenge to the activity. I decided I would post one picture online every day. Now, every day when I’m out shooting, finding and creating a really good photo is all that matters to me. I’m wholly oblivious to anything else, and time simply seems not to exist. Two hours can fly past without my noticing.
The key outcome of engagement is a wonderful sense of satisfaction when you complete whatever it is you were doing. You don’t notice that you’re happy while you’re doing it, because you’re completely lost in the doing. But afterwards, you know the doing felt grand.
Knowing about engagement has let me notice when I exercise it, and to savor more fully its joy. And now you know about it, too. So go out there and get engaged.
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