The New Year, Contentment, and Ulysses — Really!

​This morning as I thought about the approaching new year, I remembered some times when I know my Heart reached out to me.

Now, it may seem like a funny thing since we come equipped with that Heart-Spirit component, but we need to consciously recognize it for a fully functioning, wonderful, fulfilling life relationship. I know because as I thought of my past — part of my evaluation at year’s end — I sensed the touches of Heart many times, without ever coming to that point of awakening, of a fuller recognition.

Heart especially operated in me by just bugging the shit out of me concerning doing jobs or being in relationships that forced me to be so contrary to my core Self, even though I had not face to face, as it were, met core Self. I would become so totally miserable that I just had to quit, with the only rationale being I knew that whatever “it” was, it ate away at my inner being. Quit.

However, since I had not come to a full knowledge of my core Self, I — using this same mind I am using right now but under the operating system of Ego — justified new courses of action not based on who I am but rather with some altruistic perception that I would do something based on how it would help others and make them happy or better or safer or … . See, Ego made this all sound very noble, but it kept me “safe” from knowing core Self that might launch me into a life which those others would not approve of.

My Ego self and Ego-influenced mind and soul feared loss of relationship and sense of purpose, a purpose based not on who I am, a purpose based on what others needed. That is NOT Heart knowledge, Heart wisdom, Heart living.

On the other hand, neither is doing things just to piss people off, to throw my life in their faces. Coming to live and know Heart as core Self means that I will automatically relate to and benefit this whole Universe by expressing Spirit-in-me as my core Self. If the world didn’t need who I am, I wouldn’t be here. If I didn’t need the experience of the world and interaction with others as they are, then I wouldn’t be here.

Since I am here and since I know core Self, I live this adventure in joy and vitality. I want to feel joy, feel alive, feel honesty and peace and love and significance and fun and contentment. However, as I face this new year, that last emotion has become a focus for me.

Not because I’m not content, but rather because it presents something that Ego, still with me and part of me, can really use. How? Contentment, like a settled peace, is good, but Heart says use that as a base while forging ahead into new spheres to keep replenishing that — no resting, no stopping for accolades or just desserts, just enjoying them in the moment.

Why? We are here to thrive, and this old literature teacher rarely gets far away from his roots. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” remains one of my favorite poems, a poem that reveals Tennyson’s Heart works. When Ulysses, Odysseus in the Greek, returns from his twenty years away from his home of Ithaca after war and a horrible ten-year return trip, one would think he should just enjoy the fruits of his labors and fame and all he had done for his land. But no, Tennyson reveals the operations of a human responding to Heart, not Ego.

After three years of chilling, Ulysses knew he wasn’t living true to who he was. So, he makes a Heart decision. He was an adventurer and had to live that: “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! / As though to breathe were life!” In other words, he had settled into contentment to the exclusion of living his Heart.

He further says, “I cannot rest from travel//…and vile it were / For some three suns to store and hoard myself, // …Come, my friends, / ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world…” He lets others, like his son, live to their own Heart or Ego, but he knows what he must do: enter into new adventures to live Self.

As I approach the New Year, I know I am content with what I have done this past year, but I must do new things and have new satisfaction, other contentment. What newer worlds await me this year?

I will visualize my Purpose, Vision, Mission, and Goals. I may tweak my mission statement; I will record goals and to-do lists and head towards some specific new lands, but I may end up somewhere not on that map. I will, however, be living my Heart as I keep moving forward.

​Blessings!