I'm struggling today with the deceptively simple question of satisfaction. Interestingly enough, if I take a step back and look at the fundamentals in my life - do I have enough food to eat? Shelter? Clothing? - then I feel extremely satisfied and almost uncomfortably so. Guilty, even.
But then I think about all the extras that are in my life, like wedding dresses and bags and surveys and whatnot, and it's a different kind of satisfaction but just as equally appealing for me. Part of me knows that the reward for what some might label as noise will only come after a long and arduous journey, and that it will probably be very fulfilling. Probably.
But another part of me wants to just throw away all the ambition and just live contentedly forever and ever. I love my son and I love my boyfriend almost to the point where I want to hold on to them like beacons in a storm. I hate myself when I don't deliver what they need, and yet I hate myself when I don't deliver what I need. And sometimes the two purposes don't match up.
Of course, when I think about the happy vision of needing nothing and wanting less, it seems so impossible and idealistic. And yet it means that all of my basic needs would be met. So what is satisfaction? I challenge the world for an answer.
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Satisfaction is looking up a limoncello recipe on the Internet and investing the time (13 weeks), effort (much peeling, pouring and boiling), and resources (17 organic lemons and three bottles of grain alcohol!!) to bring it to fruition... and then get completely hammered off of it. I haven't done this yet, but I imagine that it will bring about Satisfaction.
Not to trivialize the profundity of your musings, of course. There is rarely a night that I don't fall asleep trying to balance the satisfaction equation between myself and the people, places, and things that I care about. A lot of the effort is spend constructing a dependency tree, especially with regard to figuring out to what degree the happy-state of other people impacts my perception of how satisfied a life I have lived. Once that tree is constructed, the next step is to devise a system of equations (preferably linear, because I really suck at things when stuff gets squared and cubed) that describe the interrelationships between my happiness and that of others.
Usually my brain triggers its ejection seat before I get this far, so I'm not really sure what the answer is (but I'm reasonably certain that it has little applicability to anyone else). And so, I brew my limoncello. (Except that I haven't really, yet.)
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