Enjoy Doing or Being Able to Do

 I focus on philosophy for life more than real/practical
information on Shanghai. Don’t worry. I will be back to the topic
people rely on to survive in this city soon.

I found many circumstances that people, sometimes including me,
cannot distinguish enjoying doing something or enjoying being able to
do something. What is the difference?

We spent a lot to buy an apartment in Xujiahui that is near Ever
Bright Exhibition Center. There was very good sports facility there. In
the two years, we never played badminton or swing there. We paid for
"being able to exercise at anytime". After that, we thought we have
reached our goal.

I have a good friend who decided to buy expensive and nice sport
shoes, so he can jog. I asked "Do you enjoy jogging or enjoy being able
to jog?"

We live in Shanghai. People are pride to announce: "We are in
Shanghai. We have the best fashion show, the best ballet, the best
film, the best museum, the best bar…" in Shanghai. Whatever people
claim, we seldom enter a museum or theatre. It seems people enjoy being
able to go to a museum better than really going there.

How many purchase started with the desire of being able to do
something instead of doing something. It is not rare to find out
visitors to a city know the city better than local. Ask native resident
about the Oriental Pearl, or Shanghai Museum - the majority of them
never tried that. "They are all for visitors". It is the same that
people in New York may not experience the sky deck of the Empire State
Tower, and people in Seattle may not visit the Space Needle.

I am not saying enjoying doing something is always more important
than being able to do something. I just started to distinguish these
two feeling so I won’t buy something because I enjoy being able to do
something. I used a sentence like a tough-twister.

Shanghai Tour for Shanghainese

I was thinking about the idea of Shanghai tour for Shanghainese. We
are in this city and we enjoy being able to going to any place in this
city without worrying about time limitation. The result is, we never go
there. There are great places in Shanghai, just like the Best Afternoon in Shanghai
that only people in Shanghai can enjoy with grace pace. Start to tour
the city as a visitor, plan one day or two days off (a weekend is
perfect) and wake up with the excitement of a traveler, even spend a
night at a local hotel. The same city will be different that day.

I have to quote Alain de Botton’s paragraph in the Art of Travel. It make a lot sense:

What, then, is a traveling mind-set? Receptivity might
be said to be its chief characteristic. Receptive, we approach new
places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or
is not interesting. We irritate locals because we stand in traffic
islands and narrow streets and admire what they take to be unremarkable
small details. We risk getting run over because we are intrigued by the
roof of a government building or an inscription on a wall. We find a
supermarket or a hairdresser’s shop unusually fascinating. We dwell at
length on the layout of a menu or the clothes of the presenters on the
evening news. We are alive to the layers of history beneath the present
and take notes and photographs

Home, by contrast, finds us more settled in our expectations. We
fell assured that we have discovered everything interesting about our
neighborhood, primarily by virtue of our having lived there a long
time. It seems inconceivable that there could be anything new to find
in a place where we have been living for a decade or more. We have
become habituated and therefore blind to it.

by Jian Shuo Wang