Moments in Seeking

Seeking... it seems to follow the cliche about a journey, that it is the journey, not the destination that is important. I say this in regards to something I believe we all seek: joy. I say joy as apposed to happiness because happiness is just "happenstance," something that pleases us in a moment, but is easily forgotten and has no lasting effect on us. We seek moments of happiness that they might be added to the jar of our peace, a feeling that everything will be all right, and, in adding enough moments over time, that jar will overflow. We will be a pillar of smiles and a giver of the wisdom that has come through the filling of our jar.

This does not because so.

The happiness we collect is like that old science experiment with alcohol, watching it evaporate before our eyes quicker than anything else. The jar doesn't stay filled. It is joy that is long lasting. Joy that, despite our circumstance even of unhappiness, will give us peace.

All this to say that it is really joy and peace we are all seeking.

If you're like me, you go through a lot of your daily life seeking time better spent, wishing we could be doing something else in any giving moment or, having finished more tasks at home, we could do the things we've wanted to do. Even in engaging in these things we've wanted to do, we seem not to be doing it quite right, started it too late or not had all the right things together, and the moment is soured.

Now, have we ever thought about these joys we are seeking? I'll list mine:

• Sitting by the fire, hot drink beside me, reading a book
• Knocking out something on the list of things I wish to compose, write, draw, or create
• Fix one of those things around the house that will make life a little more convenient
• Take a nap (preferably in mid paragraph by the fire)
• Go for a walk
• Organize something
• Call a friend
• Preparing well for something coming up
• Practice {my instruments}

Go ahead and think of your list. How often do we get to do many of these? We seek them quite a bit. My big freaking point here is that many times I will try to escape and do one of these things and it doesn't give me the joy I expected. What I want to do is soured by something I should be doing. It's that mind set that if I can re-jumble my life to accommodate this list, I will have peace in my existence, the rest of my life will have meaning. I go through my life thinking of these joys, looking out the window at rainy day, wishing that same rain was making pleasant noises on the window of the coffee shop in which I am reading my book; thinking about when I have to leave work to a home at which tasks long unfinished will press in on my thoughts; stumbling through something at work for which I should have prepared more.

Thinking of these things is almost half the pleasure, but in actually doing some of them, they are not as satisfying as we thought they would be. Our mind has talked them up like a friend who goes on about something we should watch on Netflix that doesn't quite live up. I have spent a lot of my life in this way, realizing that the seeking is often more pleasurable than the moment I sought. I have started, however, rather than trying to escape life to find joy in these moments, to try to find joy in that typical life. I look around in any given moment of life, and although the baby's fussy and things are a bit disheveled and cluttered and bills are still there and projects are unfinished; right there... in that moment, I really have a pretty good life. In that moment of life, people love me (even the fussy ones) and I have hope. If you can find peace and joy in those moments, then you can have your list. It involves a little planning, but it can be done.