There’s a feeling that comes up for me. It feels like a thin blanket on a clammy night, a soft squishy bit of mud under your foot, a weakness in the back of your throat.
I’ve called it sadness before. But that never felt quite right.
Today I recognized what it was: contentment. Not settling, but coming home and realizing that it was all always here, that everything I need is right here. That, despite whatever my mind wants to pick at or be unhappy with, my soul is deeply, radically, and completely in love with my life.
I think it comes up as sadness because there’s a part of me that’s afraid for me to be content. I haven’t published a book; I am not a household name; I have not even achieved a managerial position at work.
Perhaps then it is a forgiveness of my life. A forgiveness for it disappointing me, and a grace of knowing that it never left me. Contentment is loving your life, in the way that you forgive your partner for their flaws and embrace the core of who they are, holding their vulnerability close to your chest.
For as long as I can remember, I grew up around an atmosphere of bitterness, of feeling that personal relationships are not enough— they do not contain what I need, they are missing the most important thing. And so I learned to live life looking outward into the horizon, looking away, towards the sidelines and imagining what I will have in the future when I am free of the trap of this situation.
Tears come. I have felt this kind of moment before, when I realize how what is really mine is so intimately mine that it is tiny in all the ways yet so big that I can never escape it. What is really mine is woven into my being, it is a presence I dance with, a love I engage with in the spaces between my breaths. It has always been here, and it will always be here. It is the tears of knowing that I cannot need any more, that I am simple and I may never have the deep hunger that drives my ambition for things that would make people pay attention to me in the way that my ego craves. Perhaps those things can happen, but I will never be the person who drives myself for it. If it happens, it happens without my control, and I grieve for what that will mean for my life. I grieve for the ways in which I will have to make decisions and go in directions because I cannot abandon who I am anymore. I grieve as I prepare myself for the real journey— green mysterious hills open up, and small dirt paths between the waves of grass as I traverse under cloud, wind, and sky. I grieve for how lonely the path will be sometimes, but I set off with real friends and I am grateful. I know I do not have everyone, but I have exactly those that I need.