Why is sex fun?  Why does food taste good?  Why do we see colors or smell fresh-brewed coffee? 

None of these things have to bring pleasure.  Some lower animals and cells manage to reproduce with no fun involved.  Nutrition doesn't require taste, much less tastiness.  Color-blind people can still make their way in the world.

Pleasure is actually a bigger (and more pleasurable) problem than we give it credit for.  We tend to look at why bad things happen to good people, of why our lives so often feel hard, and fair enough.  But I wonder if we'd be served by flipping the question around for a moment and feeling the wonder of why we exist at all, and why each day brings such a stream of astounding and fun things-if we have the ability to notice them. 

If we watch TV or read a newspaper, whether we look to the right or the left, we see smile-free moralists.  Certainly we see church people warning us about the dangers of pleasures.  What's the problem with America?  Permissiveness!  Abandoning our moral foundations for free sex/ drugs/ rock n' roll!  But we also see stern, secular preachers railing against the threat of their conservative or religious opponents and focusing us-not without reason-on apocalyptic dangers like global warming, fundamentalist terrorism, African starvation/ corruption/ AIDS and a thousand and one other abominations.  From either front, celebrating pleasure can seem irresponsible and uncaring.  Maybe the only moral response to our world is a continually furrowed brow and a low-level rage at the bad people (not us) who are the problem (mixed with an echo of a buried guilt at, let's face it, how little we personally do to make any of this better).  Maybe we need to give three cheers to burdened self-righteousness!

But, on the other hand, did you deserve to wake up this morning?  However bad your circumstances are, they have a lot to recommend them compared to non-existence.  You're in the game.

The great English Catholic journalist of a century ago, G.K. Chesterton, was once mocked for defending monogamy in the face of the progressive movement towards free sex.  He was, it was claimed, prudish and anti-pleasure.  His response was that, far from feeling the limitation of having sex with only one woman, he was astounded that he got to have sex with one woman.

"To complain that I could only be married once," he wrote, "was like complaining that I had only been born once.  It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking.  It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it…  Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in a mere absence of mind."  (I've swiped this quote and a few other thoughts here from Philip Yancey's Soul Survivor.)

Pleasures do bring dangers, Chesterton argued, but their dangers came not from being savored, but from being disregarded.  The way to celebrate beer or wine was by not drinking them until we pass out. 

He pitched that the road to all sanity came through gratitude, through savoring, through appreciation-which, it might be worth mentioning, does suggest an object for that gratitude.  Without this gratitude, all we're left with are indulgence with increasingly diminishing returns and grim endurance. 

If you've made it this far in this column, congratulations!  You're alive!  You have the leisure to read a column!  Maybe, before the day's over, you'll get to take a walk or watch a favorite TV show or talk with a friend or drink a glass of orange juice.  There's a wonderland waiting for you between now and when you go to bed that perhaps you shouldn't miss.