Gratitude and Satisfaction

People fascinate me! I spend a lot of time watching other people, trying to figure them out and hoping that maybe by understanding others in turn I will better understand myself. I really do believe that every person with whom we interact serves a purpose; that they are there at that exact moment as you for a reason. I guess that’s why I start up random conversations with strangers in stores and on trains (and even on Twitter). I’ll take any opportunity to understand someone, to listen to them tell a story and to try to understand a point of view, even the ones that I don’t share. But for all the talking that I do, and all the listening, I’m still quite baffled by our human experience. I’m baffled by our dissatisfaction with the life that we have been given when in reality we all have such a finite amount of time to be able to find gratitude and satisfaction in our lives.

Recently while on a break from jury duty selection I was sitting by the water fountain at Toronto’s City Hall; to my right was the exact spot where 21 years ago I sat with the boy that I would marry, it was the first time he ever held my hand. To my left was a couple, all dressed up and heading into City Hall to vow to love each other until death parts them. I sat there wondering what happens; what happens that takes that wonderful, impossible and unexplainable feeling that you feel for someone as you fall in love and turns it into something that no longer works, something with which we feel dissatisfied? I wonder why it is that some people cannot find it within themselves to nurture love and be grateful for its presence in their life. I don’t subscribe to the theory that people grow apart, I subscribe to the theory that we are all chasing an idea of what we think our life should look like, what our relationships should look like, that we are overlooking those things in our life that would bring others great satisfaction. Our lives are not scripts written in Hollywood, our life experience is so fraught with emotion; happiness, sadness, and great moments of inexplicable grief but onwards we go uncertain as to whether or not the happy ending is waiting for us at the end.

We should all be looking for satisfaction within the boundaries of the life that we have been given. I’m not perfect, and I don’t always find gratitude where I should, and I can’t always see the sun for the clouds in my own life. I have hurts from the past that often times feel like they will never heal themselves, but I do know that the soul knows how to heal itself, all we have to figure out is how to still our minds in order to allow the healing to begin. My life for the most part is organized chaos, and sometimes it’s unorganized chaos, and I’m still feeling like my life is currently out of order, but I trust that the universe is merely re-organizing things for me in order to give me a fresh start that will be better than ever and for that I am grateful and very satisfied.