A Post Not Strictly Necessary

Now there is great gain in godliness with contentment, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. – 1 Timothy 6:6

I hope I don’t ever leave the impression that I am giving anybody advice, or “preaching” to anyone from some position of superiority.  I am always talking to myself first and foremost, and this is particularly evident today.  In fact, I am so messed up today that I am not sure I have anything to say.    

I have a book around here somewhere called Happiness Is a Choice.  It was written many years ago by Frank Minirth and Paul Meier.  The point of the book is that someone who is depressed has the option of choosing happiness.  I think that is probably true, to some extent.  For a lot of us who battle depression, though, what we are really battling is anger that cannot be expressed – for whatever reason.  Somewhere I got the notion that my job in life is to make the people around me happy.  When I fail to do this, when people are unhappy, I am a failure.  When I fail, it makes me angry – angry mostly at myself. 

But sometimes the response of those I am trying to make happy is so utterly irrational that I become angry at them.  There is a kind of a contract we enter into in relationships.  If someone tells me they want something done, I assume that, if I accomplish that, they will be happy.  So, I work long hours; I put aside my own preferences; I exert all the power, strength, endurance, and intelligence that I possess – in some cases – in order to bring about the desired end.  I expect the person with whom I entered the arrangement to then be happy.  

For some people, however, this is not enough.  If you give them eighteen hours a day for six days, they want to know why you can’t do it for seven days.  If you do that, they want to know why you can’t give them twenty hours a day or why you need a lunch break.  The demands are always just a little more than what you have done, and it is incessant.  Once in a while this becomes just a little bit too much. 

The world is not a perfect place, and, as we learned back in 1969, you can’t always get what you want.  At least by 1970, no one had an excuse.  I think I knew it long before that.  Contentment is not the opposite of ambition but of anguish and lust.  To be content does not mean that we don’t care about anything or that we do not want to make anything better.  It just means that we accept the way things are for now.  Being discontented does not move a person a single step closer to improving their situation. 

If there is one thing I have learned over many years of working on software it is probably the art of debugging.  In trying to diagnose a problem, the worst thing to do is change a bunch of things.  Keep constant as much as possible and isolate one change then another and another until the culprit is found.  It’s like figuring out which bulb is burned out on a string of Christmas lights.

Some people never get it, and some are simply enamored by change for its own sake.  They cultivate discontent and seem to live on the fruit of anguish it creates in others.  And we others agonize, thinking that there must be some rational reason for their discontent. 

In the end, I am reminded of my parents’ line about crying:  “Shut up or I’ll give you something to cry about.”  I wish everyone had been told the same thing.    

That probably wasn’t very edifying, but I feel better.