Enlightenment, contentment, happiness, poetry, ritual, sunlight, goals
ES made a post about Longevity and what constitutes living well (my phrase, not hers) for herself, the desirability of enlightenment, the value of contentment. It's an interesting and thoughtful and articulate post, and it made me think.
I started to respond to her, and waxed so wordy and lyrical that I thought I should rightfully put it in my journal, rather than burdening hers with it.
Her last paragraph (but go read the whole thing) reads, "I don't need a bright, shining moment. Maybe that's what I need to remember when I contemplate the hard work of something like meditating every day, which I'm not very good at following through on. It's not going to give me a blast of inner peace (bah-dum-dum). It'll just be another layer adding to the contentment and quiet of what I'm already doing. Enhancement, not explosive."
It's true. That's what the real work is like. I know it. And yet--
And yet, and yet, and yet.
Some of it's almost certainly vocabulary. What does contentment mean? Happiness? To me, contentment is existing comfortably in myself and my world. No significant distress, no restless dissatisfactions that endure through days and weeks. It's...doing fine. No complaints, as people say, which really means, no serious and lasting ones.
It's nice enough - way better than some of the alternatives - but I don't require it, and it doesn't satisfy me.
Happiness, in this context, is then not just enjoyment. Enjoyment is part of contentment - to live a contented life, there must be a reasonable amount of enjoyment, scattered evenly through the days. Not a frenetic constant elevation of mood, but something happening often enough to be pleasant, and perhaps not intense but strong enough to be...well, pleasant.
I think it may be something flawed in my makeup that I am not at all content with contentment, but it's true. There are things that are worse. Living in the numb cotton fog of depression and dissociation is worse - that's existence which continues without even contentment, and I've done a fair bit of that. I try not to be angry with myself about it, and just move on whenever I can. I think one problem is that when I aim at contentment, I slip down into the fog instead.
But happiness is different. Happiness is a small motive sun beneath my solar plexus. It's an exultant state (yes, explosive, if an explosion can endure over time, and what else is a sun but a single explosion lasting eons?) of feeling right with the world and knowing what I am reaching toward in the future. Happiness is what happens when I feel that I am being and doing what I am best suited to be and do, and changing as I would most want myself to change. It's a core of light and heat that has nothing at all to do with comfort or distress, enjoyment or restlessness.
There's the poem by M. Scott Momaday, "The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee". Maybe, in reference to that, I should call the feeling I'm trying to describe delight, but that seems very transitory, while what I am calling happiness is durable - not immutable, but there when I lie down and still with me when I wake.
It's a good poem. I recommend it. It ends--
...You see, I am alive, I am alive.
I stand in good relation to the earth.
I stand in good relation to the gods.
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful.
I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte.
You see, I am alive, I am alive.
It comes when I am doing work I am proud of, when I make consistent small but meaningful and cumulative changes to my life that put me on a path I can feel - a tingle of the feet like Jinian Footseer's, that tells me I am right. It comes when I stand in full sunlight and am able to let myself grow totally still and attentive, to vanish into the air and light for a time. It comes in ritual when I've repeated a chant so often that I can no longer feel myself saying each word, I just know it's still coming through me, and I know there is a time when I will stop, move on, do other things, but that time exists in another place. Not explosive, perhaps, but ecstatic.
It comes when even just for a moment I know that I am doing what I am for, being who I was made to be.
It is a sensation simultaneously transcendent and totally grounded. It is a process of hard, grunting work, real voices, rough textures, bumpy ground. It is a matter of making change that is concrete and actual, simultaneously motivated by and fueling that ecstatic core.
When I am in a way of living that brings me more and more of that, collecting thread by gossamer thread of light and purpose into my hands, then contentment is irrelevant. In fact, I am happiest in a state of focused, eager discontent that keeps me moving along the line between being and doing which is becoming.
I don't live like this right now. Not even close. I haven't felt that way from day to day for a long time now, but I'm trying to reach my way back to it. And I am not saying I have ever lived like this exclusively. It's never a constant thing, it's never fully realized, and that's all right--that is right. To live in entirely in that state would not be human. (No one lives inside the sun.) What matters (to me) is the choice to live in a way that means my face turned toward that light and my feet moving.
Once, I felt that way often enough to keep me moving. It's been years. I want it back. I am trying to make choices that bring me closer again. That might be a quest for happiness, I don't know.
Enlightenment...is something I don't think about. I think that if it happens, it comes unpredictably. It is never what one expected, and it never clears a path. As the text ES quotes says, "after you get it, then what?" There has to be more.
But then, perhaps what I've attempted to describe is what other people would consider true contentment - or enlightenment. I love words, but they don't always help the way it seems they should.