Satisfaction Guaranteed?

it seems as if we are being offered, more and more, the chance to have the
perfect life.

Coaches often talk about how we can "have it all", books offer us tips and
techniques for having a great life - we can have the perfect home, the
ideal family, a great sex life, the dream holiday, etc.

What strikes me about all of these offers is that they seem to be
suggesting that the everyday, ordinary, sometimes good sometimes bad, life
is not enough.

We are told that sex should be great every time, that relationships should
always be loving, that families should always be open and honest.

It seems as if it is our "right" to "have it all", to go for the perfect
life - as if, somehow, to settle for what is ordinary is to sell ourselves
short in some way - as if it isn't good enough to just have an ordinary
life, to eat a meal that isn't a "sensation of explosive tastes", or to
have a relationship that isn't "extra-ordinary".

There are many problems associated with this.

It makes it harder and harder for us to have satisfaction - we are
bombarded with so many ideas and images of the perfect life - the ideal
body shape to be, the ideal home, the model relationship - that reality in
all its inconsistency and ordinariness is often unable to satisfy us any more.

It's easy to feel as if we are missing out if we don't have a model
lifestyle, or if we aren't always engaged in wonderful, uplifiting
conversation in our relationships.

This dis-satisfaction creates a real sense of unease, and a lack
of appreciation of life as it is.

We can end up comparing how life is with the fantasy and images we have
created about how life could be lived, or how we think it IS lived by other
people who are "luckier" than us.

What might have been fulfilling and satisfying becomes clouded by our
expectations of how it could be, and we can lose our capacity to savour the
moment, in our pursuit of perfection and having it all.

This week's exploration is an invitation to you to savour the ordinariness
of life, to celebrate the "holiness in the mundane" (a lovely phrase I
heard in a sermon at a wedding last year).

I invite you to take an area where you feel you are missing out on
something, or which you judge to be "ordinary" or "dull" or "mundane".

What expectations do you have about this area?
What comparisons might you be making?
What would be different if you let go of your pictures about how it "should
be"?
What would it be like if you accepted that this is "as good as it gets"?
What freedom open up for you if you were to let go of looking for
extra-ordinariness, and be with the everyday just as it is?

Author : Aboodi Shabi