I’ve been searching for contentment for a long time.
I’m not unhappy. I guess I’m just looking for a more rounded kind of life, where I’m happy in the majority of it and not just for select bits of it. It’s hard to describe. I’ve not drawn up any mental pictures of this thing I’m looking for. I have a feeling it will involve a feeling of freedom about it. I’ve been mulling it over and safety and security isn’t what I’m looking for.
Well, not in terms of having a mortgage, savings in the bank, steady job etc. It’s not financial reward either. I would imagine I want the same basics as most other people, to be madly in love, to make enough money to get by doing something I get pleasure from and something that hopefully has benefit for a worthy party, to live somewhere beautiful and to have friends who don’t judge me. Am I asking too much to want all that at the same time? Is it greedy to want like that? What I cannot accept is the ‘this is your lot in 184
life, learn to life with it’. I don’t want to live with it. I won’t live with it. I will struggle against it for as long as it takes.
Does anyone truly know what they want? You look at lottery winners. Ask them what they want from life and most will give the same answer, ‘big house, flashy car, exotic holidays etc etc’. Is this what they want? If they’d have had prior knowledge that they would be coming into money and told they could do absolutely anything they wanted with it, would it change their decisions. I don’t know. I read somewhere a report about lottery winners. Most of them blow the money in a few years and end up living the lives they seemed so desperate to get away from in the first place. Sudden millionaire. It must be a shock.
One guy drank himself to death, another blew everything on horse racing. A lot of them seemed to have a nervous breakdown and lost everything, not just the money but often their relationships too. They didn’t know how to cope. Not one of these people I read about started their own business based on ideas they may had had in their lifetime, not one donated any money to charities or did any voluntary work, considering they no longer had to work for a living.
One chap bought six sports cars. Now is there not a severe warning somewhere in that lot? That these same people who thought their lives would be nothing but happy, created their own nightmare which led them to the depths of despair. All they’d ever dreamed of, their conception of contentment was so far removed from reality, it drove at least one of them to an extremely premature death. To know in one fell swoop that you’d got it all so terribly wrong. That was your chance. Your chance to contribute something to the world but you’d got used to the ‘take, take, take’, attitude that you grew up with, you didn’t realize there 185
was any other way to be. It never entered your head.
Perhaps people other than myself should spend time in peace with their own thoughts to figure out who they really are and what might constitute their happiness.
Why are we so fond of being ‘static’? In every sense.
Physically and mentally. How many people do not exercise other than skulking around the office? I would put quite a high estimate on it. I know people who won’t ever go for a walk or do anything at all that would raise their pulse slightly. I imagine the missionary position or spooning comes in useful for such specimens who just can’t be bothered. Yet, mentally standing still seems a much greater transgression. Someone I was with at some point in time commented that part of what makes us human is our ability to change and not to wallow. I thought that summed it up quite nicely. Society cannot change or move forward if the individuals that make up society refuse bluntly to adapt. Our world is in a constant state of evolution, as we are as humans. We can accept it or not but it won’t change it being true.
Agreed, I hate the society in which I live but my hope is that as it goes forward, the mistakes it has made will be diagnosed and change can occur. It will struggle to do this however, with the mentality that we carry around which emphasises the comfort of the present and the fear of the unknown. One step forward, two steps back. Imagine where we’d be if each time it was three steps forward. We might have a society where the individuals in it actually care about their fellow man, care about what they’re doing to nature, actually put some thought into how to improve things for everyone as a collective. We still could but the way I see it, we need to do something soon before 186
the whole thing is too fucked up for any change to matter.