It’s a beautiful day in the Neighbourhood, so why am I never Content?
Welcome to Mr. Roger’s View of the World
Today’s question is this: “Can you & I shift our perspectives so that we are content with ourselves and content with living in our “neighbourhood”?
I was not a fan of Mr. Rogers, the American kids show superstar, until I watched the movie with Tom Hanks about Mr. Rogers that was based upon the 1998 essay entitled “Can you Say…Hero?” by journalist Tom Junod , a writer with Esquire magazine. Mr. Rogers was clearly a fantastic guy, the movie is great too, but Tom’s essay is absolutely amazing. If you stop reading this essay right now I will be OK – as long as you read the essay. It can be read at http://www.thedqtimes.com/pages/castpages/other/fredrogerscanyousayheropg1.htm
ONCE UPON A TIME, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of sneakers. His name was Fred Rogers. He was starting a television program, aimed at children, called Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. He had been on television before, but only as the voices and movements of puppets, on a program called The Children’s Corner. Now he was stepping in front of the camera as Mister Rogers, and he wanted to do things right, and whatever he did right, he wanted to repeat. And so, once upon a time, Fred Rogers took off his jacket and put on a sweater his mother had made him, a cardigan with a zipper. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of navy-blue canvas boating sneakers. He did the same thing the next day, and then the next…until he had done the same things, those things, 865 times, at the beginning of 865 television programs, over a span of thirty-one years. The first time I met Mister Rogers, he told me a story of how deeply his simple gestures had been felt, and received. He had just come back from visiting Koko, the gorilla who has learned—or who has been taught—American Sign Language. Koko watches television. Koko watches Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and when Mister Rogers, in his sweater and sneakers, entered the place where she lives, Koko immediately folded him in her long, black arms, as though he were a child, and then … “She took my shoes off, Tom,” Mister Rogers said.
The line “whatever he did right, he wanted to repeat” struck deeply into my heart. Why is that? Because that exactly what I feel our culture does NOT want us to do. Our culture value and provides endless stimulation – there is always something new and even more exciting around the corner to amuse us. Yes, we are told, the grass IS greener on the other side. Unfortunately, any newness we encounter only keeps us happy for a few seconds or at best a few days…at the end of the day if we entered the experience empty, we leave empty. How are we to escape this trap? How can we be more like Mr. Rogers and do and be doing the right thing in the right place, over and over and over again and be content?
At this moment in history being content matters. Because content people do not need to fly to Singapore to be happy. Content people are not afraid of the changes we need to make to survive the ecological and social annihilation we are inflicting on the world and each other. Content people are satisfied with a small and simple home and a used car, or if they live in the city they are content with public transit. Content people can stop eating steak and not see it is a “noble sacrifice” but actually enjoy flavour filled meals made with simple, local ingredients. On the other hand content people have worked hard and been very aware as they set up a simple life that allowed for contentment. For contentment is, like a good things, a paradox. You have to work hard to be content with less, to be content with trying your whole life, as Mr. Rogers did, to find a way of life that is right and repeat living that way again, and again, and again to keep sending a signal to yourself and others that living right and in harmony with your neighbours and your souls, is what the good life is all about. Forget the sports cars and beach vacations and caviar – just be content with your efforts to set up a simple life. If you would like to read about a man who did just that read “Living the Good Life” by Scott & Helen Nearing. Scott and his wife Helen walked the talk in Vermont. Was their life hard? Certainly! Was it rich in a human and environmentally sound way? Absolutely! Were they content? Yes.
“There are several ways to perform almost any act – an efficient, workable, artistic way and a careless, indifferent, sloppy way. Care and artistry are worth the trouble. They can be a satisfaction to the practitioner
and a joy to all beholders.” ― Helen Nearing
Being Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor. – B. Franklin
The quote below the title by dear old Benjamin Franklins says it all, and yet… there’s the problem. I am guessing you are probably like me and that you are seldom content. Yes, I know that the grass is NOT greener on the other side, but it sure looks like it is! This underlying discontentment, this sense that my life is never as fulfilling as it could be, has robbed me of many wondourful moments. On the other hand, there is this quote which says the opposite and yet seems also to be true.
Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. – E.V. Debs
There is never enough. Not enough stuff. Not enough money. Not enough excitement. Not enough influence. Not enough recognition. Not enough love. Not enough sunlight or rain. So we all live this paradox of seeking contentment, experiencing it once in a blue moon & living it, yet also recognizing that we need drive and ambition and goals to experience a fulfilling life. So what to do?
First, like all things in my philosophy of life, I see that there are two sides to contentment: the light and the dark. The dark side has us experience contentment in a lazy, as an escape, as an excuse to avoid the challenges of life that help us grow and mature and become a contributing member to the social fabric. The light side gives us the inner strength to cope better with the hard moments in life and to be courageous as we strive, with an inner quiet spirit that it not perturbed by all the messiness and illogical parts of life [which are many]. So what is Contentment?
According to the dictionary, content means “pleased and satisfied, not needing more.” Personally, I’ve always had issues with this. For some reason, I’ve always thought being content meant having to settle for less. However, living a life of contentment doesn’t mean you have to give up on improving your life! If living a life of contentment doesn’t mean you can’t have goals, what does it mean? It does mean you have to say goodbye to that inconsolable longing for more. It means not making your happiness now contingent on some event happening in the future. Having contentment in life means you are deciding to be satisfied or pleased with what is in your life at the current moment. [1]
Our society is frenetic. We seem to be trained to never be at peace with ourselves, our family, our friends, our society, our world. Nothing and nobody, including our self, is good enough. We never stop seeking and striving for that perfect day – which sounds like a worthy goal – but because our vision of that perfect day is so perfect and so other worldly that it is unobtainable – we are always sorely disappointed. One day after another of longing and failure. As we fall asleep we say to ourselves: “Tomorrow will be better! Tomorrow I will keep my promises to exercise and be good to my bothersome neighbour and… tomorrow will be the …day that I going to finally be content.” But we are never content, except, perhaps, when we were children. Except, perhaps, in those rare moments when lose ourselves in a beautiful sunset of the laugher of our grandchildren. But this moment is but a moment, and IF we have the ability to recognize that moment, it is instantly gone! It is as if being self aware destroys that contentment we seek. This is, like so much of life, a Catch-22 – as soon as the contentment is given to us, as a gift, we wreck it being becoming separate from it, rather then becoming part of that moment. The moments when I am able to suspend my separateness, when the sun and the gentle breeze and the noise of the barking dogs and even the roar of the distant traffic are all part of me and I stop being critical, but rather just accept, then that contentment lasts… for a bit longer than a flash…. Just long enough to be able to remember what heaven could be like.
Contentment is not getting what we want but rather being satisfied with what we have. – S. Woods-Fisher
How to be Content?
This is the “how to” part of this reflection. These actions/choices sound trivial but they are actually very hard because they are all internal and require shift in perspective that I find very, very hard and have only been able to hold onto for a few moments in my life. Good luck trying!
Practice Gratitude every day
See the Good in Your Life
Learn to Live with Less
Stop Comparing yourself to others
Stop Judging Yourself
Keep Growing and Learning
Our final piece in assembling the puzzle of contentment is so find the answer to this question:
Who is your Neighbour? The Parable of the Good Samaritan has part of the answer.
A traveler (implicitly understood to be Jewish) is stripped of clothing, beaten, and left half dead alongside the road. First, a Jewish priest and then a Levite come by, [who are supposed to obey God’s laws to treat each person as a brother] but both avoid the man. Finally, a Samaritan [ who the Jews despise] happens upon the traveler. Although Samaritans and Jews despised each other, the Samaritan helps the injured man. Jesus is described as telling the parable in response to a provocative question from a lawyer, “And who is my neighbor?”. The conclusion is that the neighbor figure in the parable is the one who shows mercy to the injured fellow man—that is, the Samaritan.
So, what is part of the secret of contentment? Show mercy. To all your neighbours – be they people or animals or rivers. Notice that being a neighbour is HARD, just like being content is HARD. Thus, we see that being content is not about opting out of the struggle of life. I repeat, being content is HARD! It requires giving up of the need to “win” and not playing along with the game of “whoever has the most toys wins”. In the end, the hardest part is that t is counter cultural and thus it feels like you are constantly swimming against the flow of the river of life in our modern, materialistic world. But it can be done. Here’s another writer who explores being content, in his case, in being content by choosing to live as a writer in rural Kentucky and finding a depth of meaning in this rural backwater and finding that contentment comes not from having more, but being more: more connected with your neighbours. And who is your neighbour? Certainly the people around you, even the ones you don’t really like, but also the soil, the rivers, the forests, the fields, the birds and racoons, the sun and the rain. Wendell Berry’s novels and essays have you feel, deep in your bones, that contentment is about being connected and being part of the place you live. Live there, drink deep of the air where you are – the infinite universe can be found there and there is not need to find perfection elsewhere, it right where you are, it is here right now. This is what one of his characters says int his book of collected short stories, That Distant Land:
“Wonders,” he thinks. “Little wonders of a great wonder.” He feels the sweetness of time. If a man 82 years old has not seen enough, then nobody will ever see enough. Such a little piece of the world as he has before him now would be worth a man’s long life, watching and listening. And then he could go 200 feet and live again another life, listening and watching, and his eyes would never be satisfied with seeing or his ears filled with hearing. Whatever he saw could be seen only by looking away from something else equally worth seeing. For a second he feels and then loses some urging of the delight in a mind that could see and comprehend it all, all at once. “I could stay here for a long time,” he things. “I could stay here a long time.”
A fractal is an infinitely repeating pattern
Wendell Berry is a complicated writer. Why? He explores real life and life is complex. Life is contradiction. Contentment is a contradiction, strive to hard of it, and you will never find it. But the mathematics of Fractals, an example of which is shown above, tells us that infinity, the need for transcendence that underlies all our striving, can be found far away in space/time AND also in infinitely small – in this place/time – it is just harder to find it in the here and the now. So good luck exploring the fractals in your neighbourhood, with your neighbours. If you do, you will be doing your bit to save the world for the future. It’s worth the journey.
Let’s follow in the footsteps of Mr. Rogers who “whatever he did right, he wanted to repeat.”
“You make each day a special day. You know how, by just your being you. There’s only one person in this whole world like you. And people can like you exactly as you are.”
— Fred Rogers, the words he used to close Mister Rogers Neighborhood each day.
References
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