Enduring the Joy: A Field Guide to Staying Upright When Life Swings Both Ways

Somewhere between the first sip of morning coffee and the inevitable email that ruins it, life presents us with a choice: enjoy, or endure. Sometimes both at once.

It’s taken me the better part of fifty years to realise that experiences fall broadly into two piles — the ones we enjoy, and the ones we endure. The first are the snapshots you stick to the fridge: sunsets, successes, and smiling people pretending not to be thinking about tax returns. The second are the ones that never make it into the album — the damp camping trips, the rejection letters, the moments where you wondered if anyone else on the planet was having quite as bad a Tuesday.

Yet curiously, both are vital. The enjoyable fills the cup. The endurable strengthens the grip. Without one, the other has no contrast, no meaning, no melody.

Let’s start with the easy ones — enjoyment, that fleeting sense that life and you are, momentarily, on the same team.

You’ll know it when it happens: a laugh that arrives from nowhere and leaves you bent double, a train journey where everything runs on time, or a day so absurdly perfect you suspect you might have wandered into someone else’s life by mistake.

Enjoyment is the applause between acts, the clean shirt before the coffee spill. It’s the space where we recharge, recalibrate, and briefly forget how ridiculous the world can be.

But enjoyment alone is like living on dessert — thrilling at first, then oddly unsatisfying. It doesn’t change us. It soothes, it sparkles, it reminds us of what’s possible — but rarely what’s required.

Endurance, by contrast, never feels noble while you’re doing it. It feels like waiting for a bus in the rain, only to realise the timetable was for last year. It’s the period of life when all your plans unravel into what polite people call “character development.”

We endure heartbreaks, health scares, hangovers, hard truths, and those moments where you think, “If this is a test, I’d like to speak to the invigilator.”

And yet — with enough distance — endurance becomes the raw material of every good story we tell ourselves. Ask anyone who’s travelled far enough through their own disasters and they’ll tell you: the worst of it taught them more than the best ever could.

The trick, is to survive long enough to find the humour in it.

Of course, the real genius of life lies in its refusal to stick to one lane. Joy and difficulty rarely take turns; they travel together, arm in arm, sniggering behind our backs.

Take travel, for example — the universal metaphor for enlightenment and lost luggage. You plan for serenity and find yourself wrestling with ticket machines that only speak Croatian. You endure the queue, the noise, the delay — and then, just as you’re ready to swear off humanity altogether, you step out of the airport into evening air so golden you forget why you were angry in the first place.

That’s the point. Endurance makes enjoyment visible. Without the grit, the pearl would just be a lump of sand.

What if we stopped treating endurance as an interruption and started seeing it as instruction?
What if the bad days are not detours, but training days? What if we actually chased the enduring difficulties, embraced them as if they were an old friend?

We’ve wired ourselves to chase the enjoyable — the new gadget, the next holiday, the fleeting dopamine of “likes” — and yet we ignore the strange satisfaction that comes from simply getting through. To endure something properly is to become fluent in yourself.

And when enjoyment does arrive, you recognise it more sharply because of what came before. The laughter is louder when it echoes off a wall you’ve already climbed.

There’s a quiet dignity in not giving up, even when you’d rather do anything else. Endurance doesn’t make headlines because it looks like nothing much — someone keeping promises, turning up, taking one more step. But it’s the glue that holds every bit of beauty together.

In time, we come to understand that enjoyment and endurance are not opposites but siblings — squabbling, inseparable, and both convinced they’re the favourite.

So yes, experiences can be enjoyed or endured. But either way, they’re worth it.

Enjoyment gives us wings; endurance teaches us how to land. Together they make us whole — wobbly, perhaps, but upright.

The best lives are not the easiest ones. They’re the ones where we keep showing up — smiling when we can, soldiering on when we can’t — and somehow finding beauty in the overlap.

Because when all is said and done, life doesn’t really ask for perfection.
It just asks us to stay in the game.