Process, Goal And Dirty Fingernails

Many enterprises fall fairly clearly into two categories: things we do for the Process and things done in pursuit of a Goal. Washing dishes, doing the laundry, emptying the cat box, changing the oil in the car. All of those activities are, for me, in the Goal category. I don’t especially enjoy doing those things, but I like having clean clothes, eating off of clean plates, having the cats be able to go potty in one place and having the car run well and efficiently and not break.
On the other hand, watching a movie, playing a round of Sherlock on the computer, reading the latest Sue Grafton mystery and such are in the Process camp. One simply likes to do that sort of thing.
Yet I’ve lately come to identify a Muddled category– fooling around in the garden in on the one hand something obviously done for Goal reasons– The aim is to get the flowers to bloom, the tomato plants to thrive and produce tomatoes, the basil to grow and be turned in time into pesto. But I find as well that I enjoy the Process part too– throttling weeds, planting new lettuce seedlings, turning over the soil to increase the size of the garden so it may accommodate more flowers, more vegetables. Even watering everything is a pleasure, checking out the broad full leaves of the Red Swiss Chard, seeing newly sprouted flowers, the names on the seed packages already forgotten, gloating that the beans have been seeded so closely together that the plants themselves are choking out the weeds.
Always looking to the future for satisfaction and accomplishment is certainly a poor plan for maximizing happiness, as under that operational mode the future will never arrive. While giving no thought to the morrow, the next month, the following year would mean that the time would arrive to leave for China with plane tickets unbought, visas unobtained and the luggage unready. I imagine that it would be optimal to enjoy doing everything, taking pleasure in the washing of the dinner dishes, as well as the other tasks of day to day preparation and recovery, and to relish the long term preparation and planning at the same time.
If everything were gardening, that might just be possible.