Learning Contentment

Julianne Hough, on a podcast with Lewis Howes, talks about her relationship with contentment.

For much of her life, contentment felt like something to avoid. In reflection, she realized that this wasn’t because contentment was inherently wrong, but because she had equated it with stagnation. With settling. With stopping short of becoming. With the loss of her drive.

Looking back, she saw that this fear was rooted in something else: she was chasing success to prove herself.

She only found contentment when she found security within herself. And only then did she realize that contentment was never the enemy of ambition.

Contentment is not the enemy of drive, success, or forward momentum. Not as I once feared.

Contentment is maturity. It is growth and the realization that being able to be present, to celebrate, savor, and fully inhabit the current moment is vital.

I now understand that all moments fade into the background. All moments pass. Whether it is a moment of pain and suffering, or a moment of joy and celebration.

Moments are fleeting and deserve our attention while we are in them.

The future will come when it comes. No amount of grasping or striving will make it arrive faster.

I remember clearly having a conversation with someone during COVID. Someone had told him that he “needed to learn to be content.”

When he reported this to me, I cringed. Gross, I thought. That sounds an awful lot like settling.

Years later, I find myself feeling just that, content, and it doesn’t feel like a dirty word. It feels like living in fullness. It feels like being present. It feels like being aware of my feet on the ground and the sun on my face.

Recently, I’ve found myself increasingly sensitive to my environment and the people I surround myself with. Twice now, I’ve been in crowds that made me feel physically ill.

What I felt wasn’t panic; it was weight.

A friend identified it as anxiety. And perhaps it was, though not in the way I once imagined anxiety would feel. No, it was the intensity of being here instead of elsewhere.

I was aware in a way I hadn’t been before. Aware of excess. Of disconnection. Of people so far removed from themselves that they could barely remain upright. Aware of the strange sadness that can exist inside places meant to feel celebratory.

Like Julianne, I stopped looking outward to prove myself. I am sensitive enough to hear how loud and hollow the noise is. There is still a drive there, yes. But it’s the kind that’s settled around you, and not the frenzy of proving.

There was a time in my life when I would have tuned it all out in pursuit of enjoyment, distraction, or belonging. But contentment has made me more conscious, not less. More rooted in my body. More aware of what feels nourishing and what does not.

What struck me most was not the chaos itself, but the fact that I could no longer disappear inside it.

I was still able to laugh with my friends, dance, enjoy myself, and remain present in the moment.

But unlike before, it required intention. Awareness no longer allowed me to disappear completely into the atmosphere around me. I had to consciously return to myself—my body, my breath, my own experience—instead of unconsciously merging with everyone else’s.

So contentment isn’t a scary word.

Not in the way I once thought it would be; an end to striving, to climbing, to passion, and to drive.

No, it’s scary in the way waking up always is.

To feel, to see, to notice instead of being wrapped in the distraction of striving.

To be fully present in a life that is turning into memory.

Always,
Your Trusted Friend