contentment

a passage from a book i'm reading by robert a. johnson:

Now. Here. This is it. Contentment gives you a different experience of time; your mind stops wandering into the past or the future. As modern people, we waste so much time wishing we're in a different circumstance, which of course is quite impossible. You could 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. Contentment grows out of a willingness to surrender preconceived ideas and affirm reality as it is. Honoring 'what is' is just the opposite of living out of a 'just as soon as' mentality. Reality doesn't always go the way you would like. When this happens, you can either become frustrated and redouble your efforts to push reality around, or you can learn to accept, affirm, and even dance with what is given.

i've been reading robert a. johnson for a while now, read most of his books. i find them all to be vastly stimulating and challenging. this passage above is exactly where i'm at. trying to determine how to accept things as they are, and live abundantly.

it is not an elusive ideal Christ talks about, but it happens to elude me on most occassions. this is a problem with me, not Christ's ideal. i understand that. so what has to change for me to embrace joy? a great many things. my expectations for one. i have always wanted more, to acheive. to become. there is nothing wrong with being forward focused, but at times, it is to the peril or exclusion of the moment.

when johnson refers to the "eternal now," this is a concept i heard back in texas. one which i could never really wrangle in to my experience. but has been hovering in my grey matter for some time.

the way it was phrased there was:

live eternity now

that, friends, is what i mean to do. to tend the mundane, necessary daily bits of life but to find God in them. not to belabor the dragging out of the trash because no one else will. not to begrudge the fallout of a healthy family. but to rejoice that we are together, healthy, alive.

to love now. with its shortcomings and difficulties, with its griefs and pains. to cherish life. i do this on occassion, but it is by no means the standard by which i live.

the idea of "passionately, rapturously embracing the eternal now as your soul mate" is exactly how i needed it phrased. all things pertaining to sensuality come easily to me. i can understand this concept now in a way i could not before. it was an intellectual ideal then. now it is a tryst. a love affair. a rendevous. something i understand, if even only poetically.

in this book johnson has some powerful exercises for discovering one's projections. the question then becomes,

okay, how do i deal with them?

(how many times have i asked myself this question and wanted an answer, any answer). he says,

they are lobbed from the unconscious (my paraphrase). we cannot really know about them as they are being projected so much as discover them.

this gives me some comfort.

i want to stop projecting, stop living my life outwardly, but seems the best i can do is be aware of what is happening. i have asked too much of myself to stop this activity altogether.

that is all. contentment is my aim. i believe it an attainable, worthwhile standard. i am trying to disengage from the materialism so prevalent around me and become somewhat of a minimalist. i still have trouble passing good books and not redeeming them. will have to work on that, though i passed up four books i coveted on thursday.

peace.