I've been very dissatisfied the last few days. "My life isn't anything like I want it be, anything like what I thought it would be. Why haven't I done more and have more? Why haven't I changed more, learned more - why have I turned out the way I have?" I could go on but you catch my drift.
Satisfaction is an interesting concept. I used to think if I were satisfied, it could only be because I'd given up and surrendered ambition; I thought my desire for more was the only thing that would help me get what I wanted. Contentment, which is one of the definitions of satisfaction, seemed like the kiss of death. I didn't want to be content because it meant that I'd be like a dumb beast in a field, chewing my cud, getting nowhere.
It took me a long time to see that I rejected satisfaction and was afraid of what contentment would mean for me because I was run by a tyrannical ambition and the kind of perfectionism which told me that everything I did wasn't good enough. I was afraid that if I turned away from them, I'd never do anything at all. That both paralyzed me and made it very hard to act for good or ill somehow escaped my notice.
Things only began to change as I slowly understood that the things I thought I needed, like ambition and drive, were the very things that were getting in my way. It's not that those concepts are bad in and of themselves; we'd never get anywhere if we didn't want things and actively pursue them. But in my case, they had a negative effect. That tyrannical ambition meant that my work didn't come first; it stood in the foreground blocking my view of everything but what my work was supposed get me. I was a capitalist of any talent I had, driven to make my talent pay, in attention, admiration and financial reward. When that drive is coupled with a perfectionism that tells you everything you do isn't good enough - well, I was living on the razor's edge and it was a terrible place to be.
Slowly, I gained some insight into all this. It's hard to say why the process of change began but I know a part of it was my realization of the pain I was in. I'd been holding down my fear that I would never accomplish anything that was good enough (good enough for whom was a question I didn't ask.) But it was pain that forced me to consider the possibility that what I thought of myself, who I had to be, what I had to do, was - maybe - the source of my problems. I took a tiny first step - I became willing to change.
I began to see my ambition in a new way and to understand how lacerating my perfectionism was. I slowly became able to find them in my being, to isolate and get some space around them. I worked to bring them down to size. My desire to let them go taught me about surrender.
It's been a very long process. It took time to strip away levels of fear so that I could bear to look at some truths about myself and my thinking. But above all things I wanted to get free. I instinctively knew that I'd never be free enough to do my best work and connect with the world if I wasn't willing to have the knots in me unravel. I wanted another kind of satisfaction and contentment, the kind that comes from the sense of being free.
Well, you can tell from the first sentence of this little essay that I haven't gotten so free that I no longer feel dissatisfied. Some part of me will always want unrealistic things and make me feel I'm falling short. I'm content with that, not in spite of still being susceptible to the things inside me that cause me pain, but because of those things. I now know I'm human and humans have "issues." These are just my issues and I can live with that.
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