Now, in previous writings, I've made note on this idea but i have the urge to elaborate deeply upon such a quote.
The great bearing humanity has, is the great bearing every other animal has, death. The reason for this weight varies among animals however due to the ability to be able to comprehend mortality. without diving into the deep hole that withholds, we will focus on the humans view of death in its rawest form. For, almost every human fears death and what it holds, except for those who have given up on life or perhaps have had a severe ego death in which they could never recover from. Many of those within the christian and catholic faiths fear death as well, due to the panic that perhaps they did not appease God within in their time on earth. The fear of Hell resonates deeply into so many and of course with good reason. But lets look at the picture in a way I've described extremely often and would like to portray once more.
Lets us say, that when the sun explodes and erases earth, we somehow didn't make it onto another planet and every single memory of earth was erased. Then at that point, who is going to remember the Olympics? Who is going to remember that one party you didn't go too? Who is going to judge that one insignificant little mistake you made that had no consequence except that you kicked yourself in the tail about for many years after the forgotten memory? Of course no one will remember, and of course no one will car. You see, the issue with us as people, is we get caught in this machinery of ideas instilled upon us from the many generations before us. So we feel we have to do something meaningful and important and we have to busy ourselves with useless unimportant trademarks that may mean absolutely nothing to the person doing them. You might find the cure to cancer, but you might be the most bitter person about it because you never got to write the story that you thought would be a millionaire book.
The point is, you have to learn to not take life so seriously and to be able to let go of the things that plague you more and more. To be able to say "That's alright, at least I was with my friends." if you lose a race and it's your last race. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it to change what happened and that's okay.
Recently I've had this great deal of friends graduate and something interesting has come up to me. How many of them are going to grind their gears to become successful now, but end up in their thirties, hopeless, useless, and depressed? How many of them, in the state of trying to find something, will lose themselves in the process?
You must be content. Because content and happiness go with each other hand in hand. However, many people want just the happiness and try to segregate the content so as to make happiness easier to get. You can constantly hunt for happiness because it is easy to be menially happy for a short amount of time. However, one who can always be content, will always be happy. Because if one is not content, then they will be restless for eternity.
You can see this when someone is happy with doing the same thing everyday and they are seriously happy about it. They're content with life so they are happy. But let's also look at the alter-ego. Supposing you have a man who buys an expensive car, but immediately begins to regret his decision as he notices little scratches on it. Perhaps the door squeaks a little when he opens it. Maybe the tires don't look as good as he thought. Ram Dass made a very good point on this in one of his lectures wherein, he spoke about how you get that goody finally and then it becomes more extravagant. Then you get that goody too and your happy, but now the goody is becoming even bigger than it was.
To bring our point back to the man with the expensive car, he was only satisfied with the idea of the car. But the actual material of it was not what he dreamed about.
I hear a great many people say something extremely interesting and trivial. It goes along the lines of "If you find something satisfying, keep it forever." But lets turn that picture around and say a new quote. "Strive for better, but be satisfied to die when the skull of death places it's mark on you. For if you can do this seemingly impossible task. You will always be satisfied."
I know this idea has been put forth a great many times before this point, but i think saying this may guide you along the trail your on.
