Looking for contentment, mostly
We talk about ambition as if it were a staircase. Each step is only worth taking because of the one above it, and the top is where the good stuff lives.
I've lived most of my life that way. But something happened early this week to remind me of what we often miss. I caught myself completely content over nothing in particular: no win, no arrival, nothing ticked off a list. I looked around and realized I was missing almost all of the things I used to be so certain I needed… and the contentment was simply there anyway: full, unbothered, as though it had been waiting the whole time for me to stop looking.
Wanting something isn't the opposite of being content. For some, that’s where it lives. But a person who has learned to love the wanting has to be careful not to grasp beyond what's already in their hands: kind people at the table, an ordinary Tuesday in the sunshine, and a life that's already good enough to rest on for a minute.
Contentment, it turns out, is never built, it's uncovered: by the sculptor's hands, not the surveyor's.
Enough isn't a place you reach; it's a way of walking. It's what's here, already, once you stop drawing pictures of what isn't coming.
I'm looking for contentment mostly.
Jack Mulholland, interviewed by David Attenborough in Quest Under Capricorn: Hermits of Borroloola (BBC, 1963).
A hundred years ago, someone drew a careful map of a town that was never going to exist. Borroloola, on the banks of the McArthur River in the far north of Australia, was surveyed into neat squares and terraces, divided into building plots, fitted with hotels and stores, and a library of three thousand books, once said to be the best in Northern Australia. It was certain, everyone agreed, to grow into something big and prosperous. And then, for no single reason anyone can name, it simply didn't. The ships stopped coming up the river. The ox wagons rotted where they stood. The gold petered out.
What drew me in is the story of the people who stayed. Because a few people did… not despite the town failing to become what it was meant to be, but almost because of it.
Jack Mulholland, interviewed by David Attenborough in Quest Under Capricorn: Hermits of Borroloola (BBC, 1963). 3 min clip source.
Jack kept the near-empty hotel in Borroloola, long after the ships stopped coming and the gold ran out. He spent his days prospecting the bush, turned up the odd scrap of gold and opal, sent in the samples, didn’t hear back, and it never troubled him for a second… because the finding would have ended the looking, and the looking was the whole point of life.
Jack says this line in the interview that I’ve got on a mental post-it now:
“It would break a man's heart if he did discover anything. What would there be to live for? Nothing.”
We spend so much of this one life standing on a plot that's been surveyed for a grander future: the career, the picket fence, the comforts of wealth, the version of secure that's finally going to arrive… and we call the waiting ambition. The hermits of Borroloola had stopped waiting. They let the imagined town fall down around them and found that what remained was enough.
I don't want to hold him up as a wise guru on a mountain. He'd probably hate that. He just says it, flat, like someone reporting the weather. Here is a person, sixty years ago, who knew what the search was for.
We have so many words, now, on ambition, meaning and purpose. Jack had one hill, one truck and one habit of looking, and he was content.
What are you chasing that you’d be heartbroken to actually catch?
This week, sit somewhere for 5 minutes with that question. Write down the thing you’re chasing, then ask the harder one underneath: if you got there tomorrow, what would you walk toward next? If nothing shows up, notice that too - it may be telling you something about what you're already holding.
If this isn’t the one, you’re welcome to more beautiful questions curated in the Seed Bank.
And, I wrote a longer piece on exactly this for a book I co-authored with a few others. My chapter was About the Pursuit of Happiness. Find a quiet evening this week, pour something, put it on, and just listen.
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