Here I lay in my dark bedroom...tossing...turning. Uh oh...insomnia again. *sigh* Despite all my efforts and tricks, sleep escapes me. The room is pitch black except for the stars dotting my ceiling and walls from the night light I love so much. Next to me, I have my thunderstorm meditation music playing softly in the background, while my beloved fan blows cool air my way. Oh and let's not forget my queen size bed, down comforter, velvet blanket, foam pillows, and body pillow, all dusted with lavender oil. The perfect sleeping environment! And usually this works just fine. I've had to get this elaborate b/c I am a night shifter who works in a group home for the severely mentally ill. This is my 5th or 6th year on night shift now and it's getting harder to tolerate physically. This is actually my day off and I had planned to sleep at night, but alas, no such luck. Blame it on an overactive mind...a restlessness...a general lack of contentment with my life.
I don't have a unique story necessarily, but one I probably share with a lot of people out there...my life did not turn out the way I would have liked thus far. And so...enter my discontentedness. Actually contentment is something that I am recently trying to concentrate on. Why is it that I am not content in my life? What has caused this? How can I change this?
I have recently come to realize that contentment is really a choice. When you start asking yourself those questions listed above, you see your answers tell you that you have basically decided to be unhappy. When you answer those questions above, you find that you have created the very circumstances you will be unhappy with until......well, until you get your way essentially.
You see, once you have decided that you are unhappy with your life and dissatisfied, you have only one general answer to the question of why....it's b/c you haven't gotten your way. Or rather, your life is not going as you thought it should, or as you would like it to be. And it's because at some point in your life...you have made up your mind on a set of values and circumstances that you decided were equal to what you deem as happiness or contentedness and anything deviating too far from that would equal disaster.
Well, disaster it was for me then. There's no way I could have foreseen my life as it has turned out thus far. And I'm beginning to see, that in all likelihood, it will probably continue that way...unpredictable.
So, where do you go from here? Well, I guess you have to simply realign your thinking. "Oh! Is that all?" Yeah, not so simple and yet....pretty simple. It's not so simple as just changing your mind, it's changing how you view life, how you judge things, what your definition of happiness is, your expectations....your ability to ride the wave of life; Or as the song goes..."Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?, Can I handle the seasons of my life?" And yet...it is as simple as just making those decisions...seeing the error in the previous line of thinking and changing it to fit the new premise. Premise being: To abolish your happiness qualifiers b/c they are worthless, and to decide to retain a measure of contentment within every situation b/c you have learned to be thankful for something...anything at all in any situation. That last part was key to the whole thing. If you think about it...you cannot be unhappy while your being thankful...you cannot be miserable or anxious when you are being thankful. And I'm no expert, but if I'm not mistaken, by changing your thoughts to primarily being thankful instead of focusing on how "wrong" things are, you can actually retrain your brain to think more often upon those lines than of the previous. More simply, if you practice, it will become a habit that will take less and less effort over time.
So what have we learned today class? (Me included) Give up your silly notions of life and what it holds for you and embrace all that is given to you, no matter how small... with gladness, thankfulness, and a wonder of the amazing gift of life. After all...we are all here 1 day and gone the next. No one knows for how long. We waste time on misery when there is no need.
Thanks for reading...Good night all.
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