Do you ever come upon a quiet moment of dissatisfaction, where floating before your mind flashes the life you always wanted to have lived, the one where you made the right choices and avoided all your mistakes, the one where you’re perfectly happy? It feels impossibly far away, impossibly good, impossible in this immutable reality. You might as well let it die, because that dream of perfection died many years ago and only its phantom haunts you now.
No, what you see is not a figment of your past nor an alternative present. It is something else dressed in the pretty dress of perfection, like a wolf in a wedding gown. It is the much more simple, more attainable, more mutable sense that you ought to be doing something else. The satisfaction you hallucinate is hallucinogenic only in its otherness, in that it presents itself as something unobtainable. You very much can obtain it, and usually easily, by taking the first step down the right path.
It’s a common misconception that the rewards for virtue come only at the end of the heroic path. Rewards do wait there, but also along the way. In this moment, your satisfaction is veiled by the ugly lie that it hides behind perfection. In truth it lies directly before you, in such a simple, blatant place you can hardly believe it’s that easy to attain. Surely, you’d have to work to gain peace; but no, someone put it in the middle of your path specifically to enhearten you. Take that first step and pick it up.
The spurring moment for this in my case was getting stuck on my computer, a very common thing. Late at night, we get trapped in the internet and accumulate a weary stress, every minute growing more tired and more afraid of leaving the world of distraction to face the growing exhaustion of reality and the day to follow. Satisfaction comes as easily as going to bed. Shut off your device, take your bedtime routine in silence, and lay your head down. It will be okay.
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