The secret to unrelenting contentedness
I have found that the secret to unrelenting contentedness is to believe that there is magic lodged within every corner of your life. That by merely showing up for something that your heart has led you to do, you will find breathtaking, life-affirming moments of greatness vested within it. It’s waiting for you. All you need to do is stay alert and trust that extraordinary things will happen for you.
When I was roughly 20-years-old, I went on a day-long kayaking trip. This is when a group of strangers is dropped in the river in the early morning and expected to arrive at a designated spot downstream by mid-afternoon. If you do nothing but float, you’ll get there well-before your expected arrival time. Most people paddle around, fish, or take out along the riverbank to enjoy the wilderness. I planned to do a little bit of hiking.
The weather was perfect and the river conditions were excellent for a leisurely Saturday paddle. So excellent, in fact, that I managed to lose track of our end-point and overshoot it by quite a bit. I started to paddle upriver, fighting the current and the miles, and then planted my kayak alongside a boulder to rest. I was now hours past-due of my arrival. I ushered a fishing spider onto the end of my paddle, grateful for a friend, albeit fearsome in a Life of Pi sort of way. I realized the gravity of my situation. There was no way I’d make it back to the end point before dark. Without a cell phone, I would need to take out in a nearby town and hope to find another way upriver.
I crawled to the shore of a small Pennsylvania mountain town. If I thought the river was lonely, small Pennsylvania mountain towns offer little consolation. I scanned the scene — a darkened Post Office, an empty bar, a row of aluminum-sided houses, a park. At the park, two men were walking together. If you needed an indication of my level of desperation, it is that I was willing to approach two men who looked like they had recently escaped prison.
But that’s the magical material of life.
I explained my situation to them and where I was headed. They happened to know — by memory — the phone number for the kayaking outfit I’d joined. It was several miles away in an even smaller town. They asked if I was hungry, and though I was, I told them I was merely grateful for the use of their phone and their help. They waited with me until the outfitter was able to dispatch a truck to meet me. The driver said, “At base, we were giving you 15 more minutes until we called search and rescue. We let your family know we found you.”
And, as embarrassing as that may have been at the time, it was not lost on me that life had again dealt me proof that we are more than disconnected fragments of humanity. There are no reasonable odds that I would emerge from the river in a small town where the only two signs of life happened to be carrying a cell phone and have the number for the kayaking outfit memorized. That’s the magic of being alive.
I must conclude that life is, in many ways, that same river. We don’t know where it’s going and the conditions can change at any time. We all enter with different plans for what we’d like to do with it. It can be lonely. It’s best to spend most of your time following where it leads, but never keep your eye from the shore. You’re not meant to float eternally. You need context and connection. Unfortunately, that means there will be times when you must fight the current. When you do, believe that there is meaning in the madness. Pay attention to who is available to support you. Know that it may come from unlikely sources. Trust that your existence is meant to be extraordinary. Seek the proof. It’s there. It’s always there.
