And contentment, for me, is something I am largely uncomfortable with.
Which explains why I can be so miserable sometimes. I find the line between contentment and complacency very difficult to draw.
I am uncomfortable with contentment because one of my biggest flaws and one of the biggest flaws of a lot of people...is "resting on our laurels". Now the phrase, "to rest on one's laurels" is from the Roman days when people were awarded laurel wreaths for having achieved some great accomplishment, especially in battle. It has a negative connotation because it implies complacency.
Complacency is one thing that I am not comfortable with at all. Complacency breeds failure, misplaced arrogance and/or the stuck-in-a-ruttedness of someone being overly stuck in their ways.
Where is the line between complacency and contentedness? That is one thing I cannot clearly define without looking into this much further. In one hand, if one labors to make the perfect soup, and at the end of the soup-making process, it is entirely their right to enjoy the soup. It is their right to savor the soup, to be contented that the task to soup making is completed and that they will not starve in the most pleasant of ways as a result of their soup-craftiness. But if the person continues through life not making any more soups because they have experienced soup perfection already that is very bad. And, maybe with most soup-crafters the joys of dreaming of the soup, collecting things for the soup, beginning and finishing the soup process is joy enough to compel them to make future soups, with the Soup of Life...there is much more, too much more at risk.
If you make a soup and you add garlic, there can almost never be too much. Garlic is wonderful. If you are living life and you add love, there ought not be too much either. Love should be like garlic.
But it isn't. You add too much love and people eat that soup and spit it in your face in a violent and boiling rage. They call you innocent and naive. They call you foolish or stupid. They tell you that giving away that much love is wrong because someone will come along and take advantage of you. They tell you that you must limit your garlic or else. They are suspicious of your garlicky soup. They think you are up to something. And your perfect soup is now all over the kitchen floor.
And then you die. The end. No soup for you. Unless...
Unless you are constant soup-crafter. Your excellence is derived from your constant motion.
But then, there is no contentment, or the contentment you experience is an extremely brief cigarette break. The drive to commit the most heinously delicious soup to the mouths of the violent judging masses is ever before you. You are the cook. You never leave the kitchen. There is no rest for you. There are bursts of exhilaration at the end of every achievement, but no long lasting sense of joy or contentment because to stop would be to die, and you don't want to die yet.
Except in that scenario there is a sense of futility because to look at ones entire life as a simple long strung out set of tasks that were either achieved or not achieved doesn't matter at the point of impact...death. It all ends the same. So why not not do anything? Why even make soup? All the soup does is run through the digestive system and become energy for the digesters who also eventually will die. Ah, the delicious futility of it all....
I can't live with it, I can't live without it. Contentment, you know.
And none of this helps me to draw the line between contentment and complacency except to say that contentment leads to complacency. Complacency doesn't exist without some sort of contentment that's run amok.
No comments:
Post a Comment