Good Discontent

I don’t want a sweet, content little life. I want a life lived.

I know I’m supposed to avoid all the “bad” stuff of life like pain and suffering, but what if I don’t? What if I saw my despair as “good”? Because I am truly living and feeling and evolving toward something new. I must always demand the impossible. Then everything is possible! Even peace where there is war and freedom where there is oppression. And when I cannot have those things, I will be despaired. I don’t want to see that as bad. I see it as the only way to live.

I had a professor in college who didn’t believe in God because of the Holocaust. He was willing to listen to another’s reasoning for a God, but he just couldn’t make sense of a world with a God AND a Holocaust. Funny because his mind could typically make such great leaps, but this was where he got stuck. I guess all of us get stuck when we try to figure everything out.

My teacher couldn’t take the great mind leap, but I can. I can choose to see that everything- whether it’s judged “good” or “bad”- is seeded with potential. The struggles we face only serve to nourish the seed, to help it grow. Crisis and suffering can be trusted as much as anything else- through them something new always emerges. Unless of course we get stuck in the Holocaust.

Our ideas of Life might expand if we saw the God in everything- the content and discontent, the joy and the pain.