Finding the Contentment/Striving Balance

Sometimes I feel as though my life is the dichotomy of two desires. On one end, there is the need to be content, just as I am. On the polar opposite, there is the desire to be constantly struggling for growth and improvement.

These are both important, but sometimes I wonder where the balance is. Part of me thinks it is only possible to truly grow and stretch when we are secure in who we are and content at where we are in life.

This was something running through my mind as I was jogging the other morning. It was less than 2 months ago that I started, and at that point, I was doing about 4km and alternating between walking and running. Now, I can run a full 7 km without taking walking breaks. But now it feels inadequate when I only do 5 km. So it got me thinking... where is the balance between being happy with what we've accomplished and striving for more improvement and more growth? I'm a natural driven person, so I feel as though I'm always aiming for more. Sometimes I don't really know how long to enjoy that plateau before I start striving for the next step.

Now, I hope that you didn't read the title of my blog and start reading because you thought I had answers. Instead, I have only questions. The only thing that I can really come up with is that I think that balance and the dichotomy of desires is important. Contentment keeps us from going crazy, and the need for striving and growth is what really makes life worth living.

Choose Happiness

Lately, I've gotten caught in the trap of thinking that joy and happiness are something that are supposed to be bestowed on me by some sort of external force, blessing or circumstance. This is something I've blogged about before, so if you want all the reasoning for why happiness is internally generated, you can read that. (And, if you don't believe me, check out this Freakonomics blog or this Cracked article.) Today what is really on my mind is what DOES make us happy.

There are many studies out there, I am sure, which go into the specifics of how to raise kids happy, whether happiness is genetic, whether religious people or political people or whatever are more happy. But, since I am fairly fixed in all of the above factors, those studies have little bearing on my disposition.

Instead, I have discovered that happiness and positivity are a choice. It comes down to what we choose to tell ourselves about our circumstances and how we look at things.

Here's a confession: I get road rage. I don't know if it's my competitive side, or just leftover anger issues from when I was a child (I threw tantrums and stuff... those aren't really acceptable anymore, so I just take it out when I drive, maybe?), but I definitely road rage. (For anyone who doesn't know me... I'm really not an angry person. In fact, anyone who knows me doesn't believe I road rage until they witness it firsthand.)

Anyway, there is pretty much one freeway that connects my house to the rest of my life (work, parents' house, friends' houses, etc.), there are no side streets I can take to avoid it, and it's under construction. Construction which makes the drive home from work mind-numbingly slow. Any number of factors can set me off on the drive home, and I often arrive home completely stressed out from the drive.

However, seeing that this was a growing trend, I decided to see what happened if I just chose to look at the situation differently. "Okay, Julie, there's nothing you can do to make this traffic move any faster. You are not in a rush, and there is no benefit to arriving home even 5 minutes earlier." As patronizing as I may be to myself, it actually works. Nothing external changed, but the way I saw the situation changed.

Our circumstances really have little bearing on our disposition. We can blame them for our disposition, and many people will probably understand. But ultimately, we are the ones who need to choose how we see life and how we frame our circumstances.

Going into this week, I choose positivity. I choose to stop stressing over the construction on the Whitemud. I choose to appreciate that the snow tomorrow morning will save me from watering my lawn. And I hope that by making these small choices, it will become a habit to choose positivity in the big things as well.

Deep Thoughts on Happiness

Happiness, I've logically concluded, is 100% internal.

Here's why:

- God never changes. So, while you're relationship to Him definitely affects your joy and happiness, it's not His fault if you're unhappy because He hasn't changed.

- Stuff doesn't make you happy and I think that can generally be accepted without providing too much support. But, for the sake of a well-rounded argument, just think back to the last thing you really, really wanted. Now, think about the next thing you really, really want. There's always something new that we want. So getting stuff can't make you happy because as soon as you get it, you want something else. Emile Durkheim (a sociologist) said something to the effect of satisfying a want only increases your appetite.

- If stuff can't make you happy, then money can't either. A survey (don't know the source, or for which country, but that's okay, trust me on this) found that all people needed to be happy was a pay raise of 15%. So, apparantly, no one makes enough to be happy.

- Relationships definitely provide a sense of fulfillment and worth, but when's the last time you had a truly amazing relationship with someone who was unhappy? Logically, then, it would follow that in order to experience fulfilling relationships, you need to be happy beforehand.

- Circumstances don't make us happy. Here's why: a study (again, I can't cite the source because it's just something I heard in a sermon once) found that after people suffered life-altering injuries, they returned to the same general level of happiness they were at before the injury.

So, all that said, if you want to be happy, you just have to decide to be happy. Of course, that's easier said than done. And joy, well, that's another topic. But here's a teaser: true joy can only come from a relationship with God.