As I typed the title, I wondered if I created a double negative. Can you really be still and calm, while striving towards something when that something is being content? Maybe that’s just my minds way of distracting me from be OK and Happy with the Here and Now. All too often, I find myself looking for the next thing, a new interest, improving this, changing that, and on and on.
The why is the question I’ve asked myself for a long time. I assume its due to my own difficulty in becoming attached to anything in life, and so bounce around from one interest to another. I’m sure there is something in my genetics that might predispose me to this behavior, though I try to fight that mindset as it feels like a cop-out. I’m an adult and can either choose to act the same while expecting am alternate outcome (insanity…) or choose to change my actions and see where things end up.
That is what I’m striving for now. To be content. After my child was born, I went through a phase of, well I’ll call them less than ideal decisions; later learning that I had myself a healthy case of new dad brain (yeah there’s nothing on this in the What to expect when you’re expecting book…AMHIK). I bounced around on a lot of things that in hindsight have me now constantly facepalming at myself. However, I understand there was a major silver lining in this and that was being taught that sometimes the best course of action is to Do Nothing. Right there, that to me is largely what being content is all about, being able to do nothing.
Doing Nothing allows me to think something over. I don’t want to overly obsess about something, causing another type of inner turmoil, but give my body and mind to find peace in what I’m in at the moment, or whatever I’m trying to process. To me, that is the beginning of the path to being content. Being able to make slow, collected, thoughtful decisions on whatever it may be. To over time be able to resist my inner impulse of hey look at squirrel. I know this will be a slow process, but one I know that I must strive for. Even as my brain is telling me none of that makes any sense.
-Andrew
