Most of us spend a lot more time trying to deal with discontentment than is obvious at first glance. Depending on how the day breaks for us, we may find ourselves feeling discontent about our life whenever we:

• Compare our present level of health and energy to those better days when we felt a stronger wind at our back
• Take that almost daily inventory of our personal possessions or lack of them
• Find ourselves unable to change or otherwise control someone near to us
• Start reliving our uneventful past, or imagine an equally unpromising future
• Measure ourselves against others and, through comparison, conclude that they have more reason to be content than we do

The sole purpose of this list is to help us recognize how much grief we have come to take for granted, as though being perpetually negative is somehow natural. This insight brings us to an important and somewhat startling discovery: Discontentment always makes perfect sense to the discontented! [to be continued]