One Life – Contentment – Pipedream or Choice?

Posted by Buck Jacobs on Oct 14th, 2009 | no comments home title

There are some, count me as one of them, who believe that genuine contentment is the true “pearl of great price” of this life, a prize so rare as to almost never be seen or experienced. Based on every survey, world-wide, contentment doesn’t exist. Our modern culture is fueled by discontent, by the futile hope that we need something on the outside of us to be added or change before we can say “enough!” and be happy. How about you? Are you content? How much stress in your life would evaporate if contentment replaced striving for “just a little more stuff” in your life? Like almost all of it?

That would certainly be true of most others that I know. Contentment is just a dream to most, a far off, out there somewhere thing, that supposedly falls on us just after we have….. what? Gotten the new house, or car, or promotion, or extra zero on the net worth statement or ????? What?

Contentment is most often thought to be amorphous, like a mist that just settles on us when our pile of whatever is big enough. That’s a hideous joke friends, it doesn’t work that way. Contentment, like happiness, is an inside thing having little or nothing to do with what we have or what is happening on the outside.

Let me share a profound truth with you that was given to me long ago and that has been a source of great insight and guidance to me over many years. It goes like this “IF YOU CAN’T BE HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU’VE GOT, YOU WILL NEVER BE HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU’RE TRYING TO GET!!!!

You’ll probably have to chew on that for a while but, if you do, the obvious truth in it will help you step off the futile and frustrating path of discontenet and head toward real and lasting contentment. In fact, I’m going to stop for today and let you do jsut that, think about it. Review your life through you own lens. Are you content? Do you ever hope to be? Who do you know that you can point to as an example of a life lived in the peace of contentment? Ask yourself, “If it exists, and I don’t have it, what do I have to do to have it?”

My next post will give you the key to true contentment, real, lasting contentment. But let’s pause for now and think about what we want becoming what we have and then………