How to be discontent
But isn't it supposed to go away once you've 'won' at capitalism??
The feeling that something is missing, something crucial and whole, something integral.
Morning time, you know the drill.
Stretch, yawn.
There is an ache, and it's not your knee.
The feeling is familiar: a bit adrift, longing for you know not what but something.
Then come the questions, a relentless stream into your groggy brain:
"Where do I want to be?"
"Who do I want to be with?"
"What is my purpose?"
And lastly, perhaps most painfully: "What the fuck do I really want?
The yearning. The hunger.
The felt sense of absence is tangible.
I once did a jigsaw puzzle with 1000 pieces.
Which took a long time.
It wasn't until I snapped the second to last piece into place that I knew the tragic truth: the last piece was missing.
There it sat, my almost-complete montage, minus one bare spot where the table's wood peered through.
You and I both know it. the feeling, and it continues no matter where we go or what we do.
At times more, and others less, it comes and goes.
Like an emergency responder, our brains are early to the scene when the yearning comes on.
This time, surely, will be different.
This time, I'll be able to figure it out with my massive mindpower.
I'll put words to the elusive something, that absence that I've never known how to name.
I will Figure. It. Out.
You feel me?
This is not to say I am unhappy.
On the contrary, I am mostly happy, just not content.
A long time ago, I was married to the wrong person.
Getting married at 25 and 21 was a bad idea, but there were extenuating circumstances like borders and immigration that marriage solved.
But try as we might, the marriage was doomed.
Too young, too unskilled, too much cultural distance, not enough glue.
But I stayed for 12 years. I am loyal. I imagined being married forever.
Like final chapters often are, the end was full of tumult and pain. We tore each other apart, not knowing how else to end.
When I had had enough, I took my two babies and moved into my own place, a small house in a small town north of San Francisco.
I had a job, provided for us, and was single parenting full-time.
But I was in my 30s and had boundless energy.
The long weekend of Thanksgiving, I miraculously had a break from childcare. I decided to paint my living room.
There was no one I had to check in with about the paint color, so I got to make all the decisions myself.
I chose a lovely shade of mango.
After a dozen years of contentious decision-making, it was bliss.
The painting took several days.
There were high ceilings with skylights and weird angles.
I brushed many coats of paint over the bare walls, in tune to MIA's album Kala.
The work was slow but gratifying.
One evening, I stepped outside to the front porch for a smoke break. (Yes, that was happening then, oops.)
The air was cool fall, the sky was dark black velvet, and I could see the stars.
The house had a big picture window, and I could see the color of the living room, warm and glowing, lit from within.
Inside of me was a strange feeling.
A feeling I couldn't quite name, as I didn't have the experience or the language to recognize.
Curiosity overcame me.
What was I feeling?
When it dawned on me, I was taken aback:
I was feeling content.
Looking into my living room covered in plastic and masking tape, I saw the home I was creating for my small family.
I was free of a relationship that hadn't fit for years.
I was alone, but the solitude was sweet.
I was going to be all right.
Content felt quiet. Instead of the absence of something, there was the presence of something else: peace.
It felt easy.
The end of the relationship and the move had both been hard.
Returning to full time work was a challenge.
Solo parenting was tough.
My limbs were currently aching from all the time on ladders, reaching and stretching.
But in my being, I felt easy.
So, I know what contentment feels like.
It is ephemeral, and I'm okay with that. I didn't expect that moment to last, and you won't be surprised to hear that it didn't.
But once you know a thing, it can't be taken from you.
In contrast, discontent feels not easy.
Like the shopping cart with the busted wheel, you try to navigate around the store.
The store is fine, you have money for groceries, the store has all the food you could ever want, but you're stuck with that damn squeaking buggy, as they call them in the South.
It drags you off course, embarrasses you as you careen into the oranges.
It's all good, except it's not.
Sometimes, discontent is helpful. Eventually, I will become clear about something off balance in my life, something causing me to wobble down the aisle.
Eventually.
But that longing is for something otherwordly: an infallible sense of connection with magick and Spirit that feels like home.
Belonging.
Not something tangible, but the effervescent quality of rightness.
Our brains are just trying to be helpful with all its frantic figuring-it-out-ness.
But it never actually works.
The answer lies in feeling, not thinking.
I'm often trying to get away from the longing, but the secret land of welcome is in moving through the portal it offers.
The doorway of poignancy?
To feel desire.
That is the absent puzzle piece outlining the invisible center: clarity about what it is you want or need.
The rawness of that kind of want, the kind that makes you restless and unsettled… it can burn.
How do we have the blessing of these bodies yet long for the boundaryless connection of unity?
I wish I could just get it together enough to love what I have when I have it.
This body. This now.
Being discontent is part of what we as humans have the capacity to feel.
I've learned that it doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong.
Because to be discontent is to crave what is holy.
It’s helpful to reframe discontent as the sacred longing to feel joined with the Divine.
On a good day, I can welcome the embrace of discontent as a yearning for more magick, more ritual, more connection with the animate forces of the universe.
My longing becomes my prayer.
Choice Practice: Discontent is not always discomfort. Try to notice the difference. What do you do when you feel discontent? Drop an answer, please.
Thank you for the inquiry, Pavini! When I first experience discomfort, I try and change something up, to disrupt the cycle. Maybe change my clothes, take a bath, go outside and sit with the trees, listen to loud, pounding music. In these first few moments of recognition, I still have the ability to try something to address the energy in a helpful way, with discernment. When I try and “ignore” the energy, it takes hold and send me into a place where I focus on the discontentment, and it incapacitates me for a time.
Thank you so much for this beautiful articulation, it gives words to the push-pull energy I've been seeing in myself and others, in meditation and activist circles. (Looking forward to sharing this with those folx.) And thanks for the inquiry! I think I've tried a lot of ways to meet discontent, from "fixing" it with mood-changing music to "solving" it with stomping-around actions. The thing that feels best tho, as silly as it seems to admit: I change my underwear. Because, even if I don't know what move to make yet, it brings me enough of a comfortable fresh restart to step back in for another round.