I just got off the phone with my mother. Our hour-long Wednesday morning phone calls are practically a given. God love her.
No, really, my mom is awesome. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to keep her happy, but it is so worth it. On this morning’s phone call, for example, she brought to me a perspective that I had not considered, but needed to hear. She said that when her mother taught her never to be content, it was a gift.
A gift!
I have battled, BATTLED, with my inclination not to ever be content. I’ve considered it a curse, not a gift. Never being content has led me through drastically changing career paths, shattering relationship changes, embracing and discarding those I call loved ones and family, moves moves moves through 11 different states for gods sake, poverty and wealth, humiliating recanting of public outcries, mountains of self-doubt…. Of course I could go on. The end result is pain – as change brings a measure of pain in all cases.
Never being content is emotionally devastating with no hope of an end.
And. It’s also the reason I have traveled, continued my higher education, and raised an incredible child. It’s the reason I have had the opportunity to work through so many relationships, romantic and otherwise. My lack of content inspires my constant searching for knowledge and understanding, and it’s behind my pure love of humanity (tempered mildly by my raging disgust for humanity). My lack of content explains why I am an atheist and why I can’t imagine a world without religion. It explains why I am ravenous for more information about governments and governance while remaining mystified by them.
Without contentment, I am constantly on the lookout for new friends, new jobs, new homes, and new skills. And thus, why I am bombarded with new fabulous information every single extraordinary day of my life.
In fact, not being content turns out to be one of my very favourite things about myself. I LOVE that about me. Go figure. I guess maybe I’ll make peace with that battle, and move on.
Conscious Engagement 
The dead are content. Just look at the word. It means contained. In a good way true, contained because you have no reason to get out. But contained all the same.
Not being content has gotten me in a lot of trouble sometimes, but I wouldn’t have it otherwise.
Name a great work of fiction where everyone was content. Name a historical figure who was content.
When you are the content of a coffin you can be content. In the mean time…
Well said, fellow traveler. Thanks for your perspective! We’re nowhere near coffins yet.