"I Miss.....I Want......I Fear......I Dislike"
I suppose, when all is said and done---and more said than done----that contentment becomes the personal goal of all humans. Someone asked me the other day "why not more happy topics for your musings?". The answer is that happiness is a personal quality. One's own happiness has no broad appeal or interest to others. No one really wants to spend much time listening to, or reading about, how content another person is. I think people like to be around happy people, but not too long if the happy person babbles about how happy they are. It is far better to just be and act happy, not push it in anyones face. Then again, what about happy topics? Like what? One might call Terrell Owens' success against the odds a happy story, but not for those who don't like him. You might call the rise of Obama a happy story but not for those who oppose him. You might call the temporary reduction in violence in Iraq a happy story but not for those who see it more as a pause and the long term level of violence as bleak as ever. You might see the abundance of material conveniences available to us as a happy story, but not to those far greater numbers of people on earth with no access to those material conveniences. You might call the impact of advanced health care which allows many of us to live longer a happy story, but not to the 100 million people who will starve to death in the near future.
I suppose my more recent almost daily visits to Reva the horse which have helped her to improve her mood and not bite people or attack other horses a happy story, but she has been moved from the area and no one seems to know for how long or whether she will be returned. It really doesn't matter much since the three horses she recently has been able to share a pasture with are being permanently moved and her recent happiness will come to an abrupt end. Too often happiness is fleeting, even for animals.
No matter the level of contentment reached, humans have this life time baggage of "I miss----I want----I fear----I dislike". It is far easier to make a pet happy than a human. Irridessa, one of my cats, can lie in the bed mornings and purr loudly for over an hour. The needs of pets are simple and their appreciation for the simple care they need is is boundless and unwavering. Pets are more likely to just accept you for what you are than people ever will. It is just a pet's nature. If you are kind to a pet, they are kind to you---it is that simple, and minus endless drama.
The "I miss" part of the equation is not really so negative. The unfortunate persons are those with little to miss. The richer your life the more you have to miss. Most of the things we value in life are temporary whether it be friends, hobbies, possessions, youth, interests, jobs, skills, lovers, or too often even spouses. Gone with the wind is the story of our lives. And the wise learn to accept the inevitability of "I miss". Whatever you come to treasure you will come to miss---for this or that reason. But really, no one would choose to not have experienced the valued 'whatever' in order to not 'miss' the 'whatever' when it is gone. Philosophy is often ridiculed as a useless exercise, and perhaps to some it really is, but I find the ability to understand and see the big picture, the opposing viewpoints, the contradictions, the false assumptions, facts from opinion, and the interrelationships between diverse personalities to be the basis for sustaining contentment. Tolerance and understanding lead to contentment. Intolerance and emotional biases based on gut feelings and faith based dogma lead to discontentment. Thus, it just seems the more things you can list as 'I miss......" the richer your life has been. These 100 million people about to starve to death across the globe---what the hell have they ever experienced to miss? Those at the end of a good life who want to die rather than have their lives prolonged by modern medicine----I mean what the hell are they going to miss in the final few months? It becomes a case of knowing, in the card game of life, 'when to hold 'em and knowing when to fold 'em'. It is your hand, you call it. Or at least that is the way it should be, religious dogma notwithstanding.
"I want........", left untamed, is a 'Trojan Horse' for discontent. "Want", gone wild, is a fool's game---a disaster crafted in a 'time bomb'. Again, philosophy is not useless here. I can't really say I am more happy today because of the massive accumulation of modern devices for every convenience imaginable. I am happier only to the extent I have learned to understand my real needs, my own strengths, my own weaknesses, and tailor my wants accordingly. The formative and productive years are inescapably crammed with aggravation, competitive intensities, job evaluations, deadlines, difficult choices, personal clashes, etc. With a lot of Luck, with a capital L, you reach some goals, achieve some objectives, and get to the finnish line (the end of your productive years and beginning of your terminational years) with financial security and good health. Every time you move you find out just how vaporous past wants were and you throw out most of so much material stuff you wanted in the past. Today, suddenly this army of people who just absolutely had to have a large SUV for this or that trumped up need, now find---with the price of gas real high---that maybe they prefer to buy a more efficient smaller car. How nice it would have been if this altered imagined need could have been altered earlier---in the name of conserving natural resources. And even now, they still don't get it---to them the solution to the energy crisis is trying to find more places to drill for oil with the environment be damned, oil companies subsidized and, in a world increasingly hell bent on terrorism, create more nuclear plants and assume all these plants can be protected---you know, like ten years ago they asserted "of course we will not run out of oil". This is "want" with selfish blinders. What is unrestricted population growth but "want" with selfish blinders. I may want to be the smartest person around, or the best athlete of this or that sort, or a popular singer, or any number of other things for which I don't have the talent. To pursue such unreasonable wants is to live a life of sure discontentment. What are addictions except unbridled irrational wants? Realistic game plans almost always include realistic 'wants' and determined sacrifices. Know thyself and 'want' and sacrifice accordingly. If a rich person is not happy yet with how much he/she has, he/she is less content than someone with much less who is content with what he/she has. Enough really is enough and most religious prophets have tried through history to bring home that point. But religious prophets be damned, the typical church going fanatic has as much accumulated needless wealth as most anyone else with the same amount of money. Real sharing, the type dictated by most religious bibles, is really a rarity. The new religious right family based values mentality favors no taxation for inherited wealth---an all in the family financial empire, protected by the state from any obligation to give back to society the wealth extracted. Kids are owed a level playing field, opportunities for personal growth and achievement, not unearned inherited wealth. To sequester wealth is to deprive others a level playing field.
"I fear...." is still another barrier to personal contentment. "All we have to fear is fear itself" is cute enough but not much different from the doctor who advises his/her patient to "stop worrying about this". I mean, how do you stop worrying about something you worry all the time about? Sounds like a variation of "Just say no". How many people who are different in this or that way suffer for centuries because others fear them? To reach contentment a person has to overcome fear of diversity. Those who spend their lives resisting and opposing change or a wider distribution of justice to all, will never be happy campers. History is ripe with this sort of stuff, from slavery to voting rights, to equal wages, to equal education opportunities, to gay rights, to equal opportunity employment, to religious freedom, etc. Personal reactions to most situations need to be based on knowledge and logic not fear. It is almost always most admirable to do the right thing, not the wrong thing because of fear. Fear based on solid logic and reasoning is a good thing---it protects us from potential harm. Even religious faith is BEST based on solid reasoning and logic and experience, not ancient dogmas which reflect merely the period in which they were written. It seems rather logical that if God desired to have a written record of his demands on humans He would write the record Himself and in such a way every human had access to His written word. Every culture in Human History has always created a God who thinks like us, and had some prophets write down His words for us, a certain percentage of the words which always prove to be absurd in the face of an increased accumulation of knowledge with the passage of time.
THE FEAR TO BE ONESELF can be a major impediment to contentment. This kind of fear can also lead to an increased ability to find contentment with less dependency on others to achieve contentment. In general, with many exceptions, the less one depends on others for contentment, the greater the likelihood contentment will be achieved. Contentment based too heavily on others tends to be temporary, bumpy, beyond one's own control, and shallow. Contentment, for some, means social acceptance. To constantly please others and meet their needs as the road to your own contentment is mostly an inane adventure. It takes a rare personality to achieve much contentment that route. The alternative is to treat others fairly, with respect, and draw the line there. To the extent you have not mistreated them personally you have no obligation to dance to their tune to please them. Nor do they have to dance to your tune to please you. Fair is fair. When people are dancing to the same tune friendships form. But people don't usually dance to the same tune forever and therefore the basis for friendship collapses and friends drift away. To play the blame game on parting is fatuitous and pointless. To achieve contentedness in life it requires one appreciate the blessings which came from all friendships, brief or long, and not blame others for the end----or even worse participate in strained relationships for old times sake. We've all watched that sort of thing and little in life is more pitiful or hopeless than that. There is no use seeking permanence in an evolutionary process in which there is no permanence. Most everything in life is here today and gone tomorrow, albeit the arrival of tomorrow has no fixed date. What tomorrow always brings is a new reality, changing rules, with new players, new problems, and new challenges. By the time you reach your terminational years it is necessary to go with the flow, ride gently down the stream, avoid conflict, appreciate your past good fortunes, and relax, avoid being a pest; to the extent anyone finds you interesting enough to be around, let that be the extent of it. This is the time in life when you don't go to others if they don't come to you. Especially to those in their productive years, let them be productive and do their thing. That is good, that is the way it should be, and there is no way you can derive contentment by being a pest, depending on the sense of duty of others to tolerate you. To the extent you can amuse yourself during the terminational years, the more peaceful and content will be your days, and the more satisfying will be your social relationships with those who on their own initiative, find ways to communicate with you via phone, emails, visits, going out to dinner, etc. People are usually interesting if you get the chance to seriously engage them in meaningful conversation---not the kind of conversation you get in group gatherings in which there is endless clever, shallow, sometimes insulting or contentious chatter. Those kind of things need to be kept to a minimum. But maybe some people really do thrive on them. To each his own. Live and let live.
"I dislike......". We all dislike a lot of things. Maybe what we dislike outnumbers what we like. But contentment can't be reached if the dislike takes the wrong form. For me, I separate things I dislike into those where notions or actions make life difficult for others and those which are not my cup of tea. I dislike certain kinds of music, art, political policies, movies, sports, hobbies, personalities, sexual acts, etc. But I would never become emotionally enraged about these sort of dislikes on my part. How others dress, when or how or if they pray, their sexual orientation or sexual turn ons, who should ever or if ever have an abortion, flag burning, gun laws, who uses what kind of recreational drug, what kind of religion someone practices, their ethnic background, who marries who, etc. are expressions of diversity and opinions. Strangely, people who get really worked up about these sort of things---the single issue voters---are anything but happy campers. They always look like if they smiled their faces would fracture. They literally hate those whose behaviors they find offensive. I know, they feel compelled to say they hate the sin not the person. Of course the person must be punished because the sin exists per that person. At any rate, once you adopt this sort of mind set, contentment is out of reach, and hate becomes the essence which gives meaning to your life. Whenever you listen to someone go after these 'sinners' you can almost feel the fire in their breath. Since nothing these other people are doing directly affects them or others why are they so hateful? There are a lot of things I don't like that others do, but so what? As long as I don't have to do likewise everything is cool.
On the other hand to dislike actions by others which creates victims I find a different sort of matter. When the United States attacked Vietnam and killed 2.1 million of them for no legitimate reason, that is just outrageous. What has happened in Iraq is outrageous. 40 million people in this country without health care is outrageous. Allowing the hapless villagers in Darfur to be massacred is outrageous, overpopulation is outrageous, environmental abuse is outrageous, etc,----these kind of things are creating millions of victims across our own country and the globe. To support those politicians responsible for the policies which create these victims is unconscionable. No person with the basic intelligence to understand what is happening can go along with it and ever achieve contentment in their lives. The mind knows what a person may not admit, and as long as the mind knows these things, that person cannot be contented. There is a reason why more American soldiers have attempted or succeeded in committing suicide during or after their stint in Iraq than have been killed in Iraq. They saw the reality---not just meaningless numbers and meaningless terms like 'surge' and 'freedom fighters' and 'victory'; they understand what they have been a part of, and that understanding is more than they can handle, more than they can rationalize away, and they end up escaping the mental nightmare via suicide. Of course most people never get that close-up look at the victims from these unconscionable political/economic policies, or if they do, they have the mental strength to resist suicide, but they will never reach a state of contentment. I doubt a normal person can go along with victimizing others to that extent and hide the reality of their participation or support from their own subconscious. It reminds me of that long ago radio show "The Shadow Knows". The German population can say they didn't know about the concentration camps, but they knew, just elected not to 'know'. All of us elect not to know many things we really do know. The point is that to be content one must dislike and be angry about the right issues in the right way. If you can't change the world alone you can at least live your own life, expend your own resources, support the right politics, and have the right priority for those issues which bring the maximum prosperity, justice, and peace to the greatest number of people and species on our planet, while protecting the planet itself. The best things in life aren't things, the most important understandings of life aren't knowable---death might not be the end---it may not even be the beginning of the end; but it might, perhaps, be the end of the beginning. "There is a way of life, a way of thinking, of behaving towards other men and your fellow creatures, towards all living things, towards the whole earth and the sky and the sun that is based on love, on compassion, on respect, on cherishing everything there is around you because it is wonderful, unique, it's natural and good and it evolved that way by itself, it's got to be cherished and if we think like that and live that kind of life, we can all have our freedom, we can all have our happiness, we can all feel the sun and smell the grass and smell the flowers and look upon each other with appreciation." (Davis) This, to my way of seeing things, is the thoughtful road to contentment. All else in life is noisy static.
Of course contentment is a relative term. No one goes through their life singing 'zippy do dah day' all day long. But all of us know it doesn't take long to be around someone to get a measure of just how contented they really are. We need more contentment in this world. We need more live and let live. We need different priorities. We need to sacrifice more in the name of justice for all. We need to discipline human behaviors across the globe. And for our own good we all need to discipline ourselves, to know our own selves, and seek a healthy niche in God's evolutionary process.
Right now I think I will be more contented if I take a short nap.
