Not content with your life?
Not content with others in your life?
Not content with the world?
And maybe...
Not content with yourself?
Growth, self-development, self-actualization, integration, empowerment, wholeness, etc. with the hope of it leading to contentment as the goal. Call it what you will, it is what we are all after. Whether you believe that or not, Is there much of anything you DO that does not have as its underlying motivation exactly this? Dig into it and I think you'll find the answer to be: no.
But how do we know what to aim at and what to do? That is a very real problem. It is perhaps THE problem of our time.
This conundrum of too much information, too many choices, too much confusion, too many options, and too many others bombarding our minds with signals they wish to see us act on, for their own personal contentment, makes the prioritization of our most precious commodity, our time and our efforts, our actions on a daily and hourly basis.
Life happens and life is, on a daily and hourly basis. The past is a story. The future is a story. Life is only now, always now.
This fundamental conundrum of what to aim at and what to do in order to achieve contentment with our life usually leads to doubling down on what we have been taught "should" work, what we learned in the past (consciously or not) that worked in the past. Old stories in our subconscious with childhood and adolescent roots and old stories we were taught.
Or jumping around randomly and ineffectively based on our hunches doing the best we can to filter useful, useless and harmful. This process gets fed by the firehose of suggestions we are all bombarded with daily, coercions, enticements, and manipulations piped into us by the other real people in our lives: friends, kids, co-workers, hubands/wives.
Also by: media, politicians, news, ubiquitous and almost inescapable advertising/marketing, bloggers, ew stories, social media, random miserable people greedy for power, or people trying to make a buck.
A root it's all people just trying to find contentment in their own lives. It pains my old self who fought this forever, but we are deeply social creatures. Find me someone truly happy and content alone. I'm sure there are a handful of content hermits in the world, but their exception proves the rule.
One result of our ancient social wiring is that everyone is trying to pull everyone else into their personal story, their beliefs, their rights, and wrongs, their shoulds and their should nots, in order to help the hero of their story triumph, themselves.
One thing to keep in mind about that is, that it's not optional. We all do this and we always will. We all live in a story and we all always will. We all try to get others, in subtle and not so subtle ways, to see our story as the correct one.
These are some things that actually are optional though, things we can choose:
- What the story we live by IS
- To what degree we consciously choose the story we live by
- To what degree we allow our own story to evolve with our experiences vs our writing it in stone
- How willing we are to allow the others to have a story that differs from ours, and to what degree
- How willing we are to keep people in our lives whose story conflicts with ours in fundamental unreconcilable ways
- How willing we are to let others people and other outside influences edit or re-write our story.
So back to the practical. There are a million potential problems to address, a million potential solutions, plenty of old traps, and plenty of new ones we've yet to step in. What to do? What is our story? What should it be and what to focus our time and efforts on, right now?
The answers will be different for everyone. No one's story of adventure and contentment is identical to another's. What I hope to convey in this though is that we all live a story we wrote, we can edit it and so can others.
What story are you living now? Would you like to make some edits?
Below I'll post four short videos I believe can aid you greatly in your editing and authoring of your life story covering both body and mind. Because, yeah, in in my story, and it worked for me.
If you relate to any of those first four questions, it just might be worth your time.
One above, the other three below. First two mind, second two body.
Why risk-taking is crucial. What courage actually is and why it matters, to you.
Mind is only half the puzzle. How our Body Shapes our Character
How to Use Your Body to re-shape your Character