Doing What You Will

 I recall reading a book by Aldous Huxley years ago, in my early 20s, and it was called Do What You Will. I have forgotten where the title of the book comes from exactly, but I remember reading this book at a time when this is exactly what I was doing--doing what I willed--and enjoying it as well. I was enjoying the fact that I had one more year before graduating from university, as well as the fact that I was no longer reading books because I was forced to or felt the need to 'lift myself' out of the quagmire of literature. I was simply reading whatever I wanted to read, in particular Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, and a bevy of other writers.
   Lately, I experience the same sense of wanting to read more of what I like. But I am old enough to recognize that this is simply in response to the pressures of having to read what I don't particularly enjoy or find engaging, and thus reacting to the implied "other" who is authoritative and happens to enjoy what I enjoy less. The point is: what happens to that enjoyment when the sense of pressure is no longer there? Sometimes the enjoyment stays, but more likely, it starts to transform into a kind of routine, where one no longer delights in the contrast between unpleasant and the "healing pleasant".
   The point is: even when I say I have a "will" of my own to enjoy the things I really "like" to do, it seems to me that the notion of liking is contingent upon states of dislike. I mean that without the sense of what I find cumbersome, there is no real enjoyment of the less cumbersome. And why is that? The only answer I can think of is that the two states of being are always interconnected and exist in unique tension with one another that is dynamic and changing.
   "Like" and "dislike" are really two sides of a coin. While this isn't to say that one should discard likes, it might be helpful to know how like and dislike co-exist in tension, and are even indispensable to one another. A good example might be ice cream. I remember when a friend and I had gone to a mutual friend's house and ended up raiding the ice cream --literally starting out with a small taste and later culminating into many gulps of ice cream before the friend came back! Had the friend never come back, the ice cream would have been seen as already within our means, and therefore perhaps less delightful. Everyone has heard about the idea that making something "forbidden" only increases our desire or craving for it, but this might be another way of saying that unpleasant repercussions always hang over the pleasant, warning us not to take too much and to be mindful of the consequences.