It’s often wise to postpone pleasure, but it’s never wise to postpone joy.
Your mind will tell you that you can’t be joyful now. It will insist that you can only be joyful sometime in the future, once you get whatever you want. What your mind doesn’t know is that joy is a present reality, not a future one.
If you postpone joy until you achieve some future success or arrive at some future destination, you will never arrive. Or you will arrive, but the destination won’t be what you expected it to be. The success won’t give you what you wanted. Joy deferred is joy denied.
Joy never happens then, later, in some distant future. It always happens now. So when you ignore, deny, or miss the now, you miss out on joy. If you postpone pleasure, you may experience delayed gratification. But if you wait to feel joy, you will wait forever.
Joy is already deep within you and all around you. It’s an intrinsic part of the journey, not just the destination. You can’t achieve joy or arrive at joy in the future. But you can find it and feel it here and now.