I had thought that being happy with my lot was a betrayal of my desires. If I was content, didn’t that mean that I didn’t really want what I was striving for? And even when things appeared to be over, wasn’t acceptance also a kind of denial of the intensity of desire? How could I be happy if I didn’t get the thing that I’d been working for? What the hell was the struggle for if I could be happy without obtaining the object?
That logic (is it logic, is it habit, is it culture?) still is superficially appealing to me — it makes sense. But I’m finding that it is falsified by lived experience. I can’t change the outcome. Since I can’t change the outcome, and it is possible for me to be happy anyway, I should just be happy anyway. Today, I felt happy anyway. I felt the goodness of not striving, straining, trying to change the facts.
It’s scary to type that. I fear that I’m inviting some other outcome in some other situation in which 1) I can’t change the outcome and 2) it isn’t possible for me to be happy anyway. I expect myself to be punished for being happy with my lot — and this is weird because I think of myself as basically a happy person. But maybe the only way I could tolerate being basically happy was to be dissatisfied with the specifics. Or maybe it was a lie that I was basically happy. I do tend to seek dissatisfaction more readily than satisfaction. (By the way, I recognize that this post lacks a certain crispness. I’m tired, I’m in a hurry, and I think I’m experimenting with posting without using the words “having another baby” ).
I also am unnerved by the relief I feel in not straining, trying, in not making heroic efforts to overcome circumstances. Isn’t that what high-achieving people do? (Yes, the rhetorical questions are at an all time high in this post — just go with it). Who is ever celebrated for saying, “Yep, the status quo is fine with me”?
But that’s how I feel today. Perhaps I’ve become a Buddhist in just two posts!
Another Door 