Contentment is Like My Holy Grail

Contentment is like my holy grail. I’ve been searching for it most of my life.

Is it here? Maybe here? Maybe once I get there? Or maybe if I could just have what SHE has?

I believe wholeheartedly contentment is out there. Somewhere. Around the next corner perhaps. Or in the next season. Or when my kids get a little older. Or when things eventually slow down. Or maybe if my husband and I can finally pay off some of our student loan debt. Or maybe if I could just miraculously lose 10 pounds (though I’m guessing at this point it would take 20).

I can feel myself getting all knotted up inside as I search. My heart pounds. I can’t sleep. My brain is pelted with questions like, What in the world am I supposed to be doing here? What is my purpose? And what, exactly, is the point? Will I ever feel content? Is ‘contentment’ simply an illusion?

Plus, some days I’m embarrassed to admit that I pass the hours noticing what other people have—their successes, their gifts and talents, their ‘blessings.’ Then I hold it all up next to my own life and compare.

It’s only once in a great while I realize the incredible irony of my quest: that contentment has nothing to do with striving or reaching or getting there or comparing or measuring up (and, though I’ll never truly believe it, nothing to do with my weight), and instead has everything to do with breathing and letting go and sinking within and being here.

Right here…

In this body and this house, with this spouse and these children, at this job with those parents, with this ever-growing roll of flesh collecting around my middle due to perimenopause and the day-to-day moments of good, hard, ordinary life wrapped up into one.

THIS it seems, is life. And ever-so-slowly I am beginning to understand that contentment is simply our best attempt at the beautiful ordinary living of it.