Path to Contentment...

What does it mean to have enough?

Has it struck you that no matter what we achieve, how much money we earn, or how many blessings come our way, more is never enough? There seems to be an epidemic of discontent.

“Contentment is a treasure,” the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) said. The problem is we search for it out there. Yet contentment comes from the inside, in the very place where we currently exist. The word itself, contentment, carries the clue to be content—to be at peace with what you already contain.

Realizing this can save us from exhausting a lot of misdirected energy and put us on a more fruitful path.

How exactly have we been programmed by society? “The right to the pursuit of happiness,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.”

Alan Watts observed long ago that we are breeding a type of human being incapable of living in the present—that is, of really living.

There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. The future is a hoax. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, “Now, I’ve arrived!” Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing how you how to be alive now.

The modern man does not know what he wants. He works for success, fame, a happy marriage, fun, or to help other people. But these are not real wants because they are not actual things. They are the by-products which have no existence apart from some substance. Money is the perfect symbol of all such desires, and to make it one’s goal is the most blatant example of confusing measurements with reality.

All that exists is now. To find contentment, then, our mind must stop wandering into the past or the future. There’s no point thinking about what once was, what might be, or what ought to be. Our mind keeps us embroiled in illusions of our own making.

We project that “Just as soon as I make enough money, I can relax.” Or “Just as soon as I get a better job, a bigger house, take a vacation ... I will be content.” And so our capacity for contentment is thrust onto another time, a different place, a better circumstance.

In their book Contentment: A Way to True Happiness, authors Robert Johnson and Jerry Ruhl call contentment being in love with the moment, “not just dutifully accepting it like an arranged marriage but passionately, rapturously embracing the eternal now as your soul mate.” Alan Watts invites us to the “way of acceptance,” being contented with whatever comes.

This doesn’t mean that you should give up or become passive. When things don’t go the way I wish, I assume a larger plan is at work. This unseen pattern—call it fate or the will of God—may not be clear to me now, but it will be revealed, and I accept it. I have no interest in grabbing life by the collar and throttling it into submission.

It is I who submits. I move away from insisting that life be this way or that, and I learn to dance with the music that plays. I may take the lead, assert my will, and fate moves with me. On the very next step, I relinquish the lead and I follow. It means letting go of getting my way.

True contentment grows, not out of pursuing self-interest, but from seeing divine providence in all that crosses our path—the disappointments and defeats as well as the joys and victories, and even in those circumstances that we don’t want and would never choose.

Religion has become a dirty word, and some people have trouble acknowledging a power greater than themselves. We have been programmed to serve the ego rather than the divine. With godless spirituality, we no longer affirm life as the play of God. All our discontent is mostly because of our lack of belief.

The Sufis say contentment and perfect submission opens up a harmonious feeling and brings the divine will into harmony with our own. Our blessing now becomes a divine blessing, our words divine words, our will absorbs into the whole, and so our will becomes the will of God.

“Contentment makes a man rich,” said Sheikh Sa’di, “tell this to the greedy world-travelling one.”