Fun and Satisfaction

Satisfaction has to do with my experience of life. It's the experience I have when whatever's going on for me is all that needs to go on for me. I would say that I find myself in a continuous state of satisfaction in my life.

Now, satisfaction has its ups and downs; sometimes I feel joyful and sometimes I feel sad. Yet feeling sad doesn't mean I'm not satisfied--I'm just feeling sad. When I feel joy, that's the positive side, the frosting on the cake.

Joy has a positive charge at the moment that I feel it. Satisfaction, on the other hand, doesn't have that charge. While joy is that sense of expectation I've been holding that I now experience as being fulfilled, satisfaction say, "Everything is fine; the world has served up to me exactly what I want." Joy goes a little further. It says, "I thought I wanted this-I got this-and wow! Now I've got joy." It would have been okay not to have gotten joy, but it certainly is delightful to bring home the bacon--to set out to do something and do it.

Satisfaction is spawned by internal sources while joy comes more from external sources. Joy has to do with results and goals, while satisfaction includes but is not inclusive of results and goals. Satisfaction comes from being able to deal with the world the way we see it and the way it is presented. But to pull away from satisfaction, I have to be saying to myself, "This experience should be different than it is." When I set that up, I go into negativity.

Clearly, dissatisfaction occurs when I have an expectation that's not being fulfilled: when I think something is not working the way it could work, should work, or was supposed to work. There is no dissatisfaction when I get that the world is exactly perfect as it is. When I'm perfect in my participation--accepting that things are the way they are--there can't be dissatisfaction.

If I want some particular facet of life to be different from the way it is, the first thing I have to do is be willing to accept it totally the way it is--not just accept it so that it will go away, but actually make it totally fine. Then, and only then, can I move forward to the next goal.

If I look out into the future and say to myself, "Boy, I'd really like to have Y," then I'd look at where I am in the present. In other words, I have X now and I've got to be fine with X before I can go for Y. The day that I get up in the morning not feeling fine with X is the day that Y moves further away from me.

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