What if everything we want we want because we’ll feel better when we have it? What does that mean about our desires?
I spent the day yesterday with a friend of over 20 years. A startup entrepreneur, he’s got at least a couple million in the bank. He lives in the suburbs, in a beautiful, large, traditional house he owns outright. He has three lovely sons, all grown. His marriage to his wife has lasted over 50 years. Even though they’re rich, they’re also frugal. Both their cars have over 100,000 miles on them. One, a passenger van looks like it has over 100,000 miles on it. The other, a beetle, is the wife’s car. It’s immaculate.
Every time I hang out with this guy, I’m impressed with who he is. He focuses his life on giving back: to his family, his community. His startups are nearly always about creating prosperity for the most disadvantaged. The latest idea of his has to do with teaching entrepreneurship to the formerly incarcerated. And, should those businesses succeed, he invites those business owners to contribute a portion of their revenues to help build other companies that will support similar causes.
My life is decidedly different. I live in an urban area, in an apartment I rent. The diversity around me is incredible. I can get anywhere I need to in at most, a 20 minute walk, 10 minute bike ride or via public transportation. If necessary, I can rent a car for longer trips, although that hardly ever happens. And, my apartment is tiny compared to my friend’s home.
Our lives couldn’t be much different.
“It’s so refreshing”
But what stands out the most, for me, is how satisfied I am with all of my life. Not just my personal trappings, but life in general, including what’s happening here in the United States. My satisfaction, borne of the Positively Focused practice, affords me a deep peace in knowing everything is unfolding as it should. And, a knowing that life is getting better for everyone, even when it looks like it’s not.
But my friend and his wife are struggling with the “what is” of life. They’re suffering in seeing what’s happening, extrapolating a future from how they’re interpreting what’s happening into one that affords bleak misfortunes for their children, and their friends’ children. In other words, for all their material, apparent success, they can’t find the most important success of all: peace of mind.
Which is why when I shared what I see about what is and the future, the wife said “I’m so glad to hear your positive perspective on life. It’s so refreshing.”
We are joy incarnate
Materially, my wealth doesn’t compare to my friend’s. And yet, when I returned home from spending the day with him, I felt richer than ever. Not because I live in grand stature, but because my experience of life is determined by nothing other than my connection to All That Is and the joyful, sovereign, happiness that springs from that relationship alone.
Indeed, when I got home, I reveled in my own company, in my tiny apartment. I enjoyed seeing the trees in front of the building I live in and the sun splaying through their leaves. The sounds of my neighborhood felt so alive and vibrant. And in that witnessing, I knew many of the desires I once had, and still kind of have – for more money, for example – pale in comparison to the joy I feel in my own skin, in my own life.
I don’t need anything more than what I have (my life) to feel joyful, to feel peace, to feel I have all I want. And in that space, that vibration, I know anything else I desire is mine. Because I am that which I desire most.
You can enjoy a life condition as I just described. It can not be found in things. It’s not available to those pursuing what society tells us we should have. But through pursuing those things, everyone slowly realizes how relatively unsatisfying that pursuit is. And how much more value an inner-derived sense of peace offers.
Finding peace through the pursuit of the fleeting satisfaction found in material consumption is a valid path toward ultimate peace. Most people live their lives on that path. But you can take the shortcut to deep satisfaction by finding that joyful state that is YOU, right now.