contentment

Simple things, simple pleasures, cutting and splitting wood, a love of the country they wanted to see more of, memories of softball fields and a girl named Amanda. There are such women as Theresa "Sam" Fitzgerald who love their men. Are content with their lives together.

One of the Enemy's most effective strategies is to get you to focus on what you don't have, what you used to have, or what someone else has that you wish you had. He does this to keep you from looking around and asking, "God, what can You do through what I have?

Inner contentment liberates the soul

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanation for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's needs. (As my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it: "Desire is the design flaw.") The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: "You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.

I felt a taste of that other kind of contentment that doesn't come from acquiring information or getting praise or building a resume, the kind that is just there, like a hidden pearl.

Where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.

Don__ Seek Happiness - Happiness is like an orgasm: if you think about it too much, it goes away. Keep busy and aim to make someone else happy, and you might find you get some as a side effect. We didn__ evolve to be constantly content. Contented Australopithecus Afarensis got eaten before passing on their genes.

In the Salem of our peaceful hearts, the name of Jesus is great beyond compare: He has won our love, and He shall wear it.

I was so nearly happy. There remained only a tiny something, something unexplained and inexplicable that buzzed in my ear when the lights were out, like a malarial mosquito.

When the symphony of life fills your heart, the chorus of contentment joins in.

Just this once, in the very heart of the busiest of cities, everyone was perfectly content not to move and hardly to breathe. And for those few minutes, while the song lasted, Times Square was still as a meadow at evening, with the sun streaming in on the people there and the wind moving among them as if they were only tall blades of grass.

Some things are hard to imagine. Can you conceive of excessive contentment, for example? Or an over pleasant evening? Too much happiness?

We call bad one who rejects the fruit he is given for the fruit he is expecting or the fruit he was given last time.

Indeed, I have observed one ingredient, somewhat necessary in a man__ composition towards happiness, which people of feeling would do well to acquire; a certain respect for the follies of mankind: for there are so many fools whom the opinion of the world entitles to regard, whom accident has placed in heights of which they are unworthy, that he who cannot restrain his contempt or indignation at the sight will be too often quarrelling with the disposal of things to relish that share which is allotted to himself._

A breeze blew softly, slightly rippling the water as it carried the heady scents of late Carolina springtime through the air. Honeysuckle. Jasmine. Ripe, pungent river mud. Ah, the world felt right.

If all I had was all that money could buy, I'd be bankrupt!" EL

If you are not content today, there is nothing you can buy tomorrow to change that.

Part of the trick of being happy is a refusal to allow oneself to become too nostalgic for the heady triumphs of one's youth.