What To Enjoy

I enjoy sitting reading a good book with some tea or coffee or sitting in the same room with a few of my good friends simply enjoying one another's company. I enjoy conversations that lead to deeper friendships or a change in a person's life or a challenge for my own life. I enjoy good food for dinner and playing an exciting game of Volley Pong after. I enjoy playing my guitar (named Ms. Abby) in my room, or lulling someone to sleep at night.
(I almost feel as though this introduction should be placed on a list of things I enjoy on eHarmony or another dating site...)
There are many things that I enjoy. I've been thinking lately about what I enjoy and do not enjoy. Its mostly the difference between work and play. I was reading about a man long ago who search in everything for joy. He wrote about his experiences, you can think of this as a sort of documentary about his endeavors or a memoir, I like to say he was blogging about his experiences before blogging even existed; the first blogger!. It is called Ecclesiastes if you are interested in reading it. The man's name was Solomon, (its pronounced Shlomo in the Hebrew language; slightly humorous) he was the king of the Israelites, who has been said to have more wisdom than any man before him and any that came after him. He inherited a kingdom at the peak of its existence from his father David. With his power as king, he sought to please himself. In his memoir, the two words that he write the most (or forms of it) are vanity and joy. I find it interesting that a man who is out seeking his own desires speaks so much vanity over what he did. There was much that he enjoyed, but it still was not completely pleasing. Sure he admits to enjoying a lot of it, but he still calls all of it vanity.
Despite all the vanity he did find good in his search for joy and pleasure. Solomon says over five times in his book, which for a book so short is like he is a train blowing his horn on and on again, a certain phrase that he considered good and enjoyable. "A man can do nothing better than eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This is a gift from God." This phrase is said over and over again accompanied with different ideas like: God allows those who please him to enjoy their toil, and those who do not please him are not allowed to enjoy it; God wants us to enjoy what we are doing so we do not worry about the future or complain about what may happen. Perhaps you are now finding this interesting too. Solomon, the wisest man ever to live, who spent his time seeking to please his desires, says there is nothing better to do than eat, drink and enjoy work? Do I enjoy my work? Maybe he meant that we should enjoy the fruit of our labor? (the PAYCHECK!) Either way it says that this joy we get is a gift from God...odd...because when God banished man from the Garden of Eden, he said he would be cursed by having to toil/work with the ground. Yet we are supposed to get joy out this curse? Somehow this curse has become a gift. I feel like this should be an idea from the New Testament, but its found in Ecclesiastes a book that may have been the first written in the Old Testament. It is sort of an odd concept though, that the gift from God is that we are able to find enjoyment in this curse. Maybe thats why its a gift? Maybe God knows that is exactly what we need in our lives, something that we enjoy. Work takes up most of our time, it doesn't seem like too bad of an idea to start enjoying it.