Finding the satisfaction of enough is no different than the idea of learning to lift weights. First you begin to do it in small amounts, and as you become better at it, the amount increases. So, for example, when you begin lifting weights, you may start with simply five pound weights. However, after you’ve gained strength you’ll soon be lifting fifty pound weights. Okay! Maybe not fifty pound weights, but you see our point! In learning to experience the satisfaction of enough, you need to start with small amounts, such as acknowledging the satisfaction you feel in minutes of time. From there, you can learn to revel in the satisfaction on a more consistent basis. It’s this theory that makes us love this week’s quote of the week.
“He that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years must learn to know the present value of single minutes and endeavor to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground.” Samuel Johnson
It would be easy, given the current social pressure to use every available minute to gain, gain, gain money and goods, to look at that quote and interpret it as saying that you should maximize every minute to increase your financial and material worth. However, when you look back hereafter, is that what will make you feel “satisfaction upon past years?” Chances are great that it will not. However, those minutes do have value, and that value is the currency with which you can do things that, when it’s time to sit comfortably in a rocking chair, will give you that sense of satisfaction. The beauty is that using those minutes to do the types of things, whatever they may be, that will give you satisfaction, will not only lead to the ability to look back at your life and be satisfied. It will also lead to being satisfied within those minutes themselves.
Samuel Johnson was a wise man and an English writer who is most famous for his comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language, which was considered the pre-eminent English dictionary from its publication in 1755 until one hundred and fifty years later when the Oxford English Dictionary was published.
