From my earliest childhood, I always heard the future spoken of in superlatives: the best, the best possible,—always superlatives. There was an unspoken assumption that each human being was uniquely suited to something, and that if they found that unique thing and worked at it, they could become the best at something. Some of my early successes revolved around the piano. With a bit of work, I was able to excel beyond the skills of my older brother, who was five years my senior, and often times, whether he knew it or not, was the object of my competition. I kept up with other students of my teacher, and though I noticed that I wasn’t always on top, I was close. And then I started junior high: seventh grade in those days; we didn’t have middle school.

I went to junior high in seventh grade, and there, in my homeroom, was a Jewish kid. In fact, he was the first I had ever met. Sometime during the year, he had the opportunity to play the piano for us. We were all thirteen, and this scrawny guy sat down and ripped out a Rachmaninov prelude with ease and grace. I had never seen anyone play like that for real. It was always something on television. And here it was, right in front of me, by someone my own age. And at that moment, I knew that I would never play like that. I also thought that he had found his unique thing, and I needed to go look for something else.

As my world continued towards adulthood and widened its scope of contacts, I learned repeatedly that I was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Though I had a bit of talent at one thing and another, I was pretty much above average, at best, I guess like all the children at Lake Wobegon. The illusion of being “uniquely suited” turned out to be a pep talk, but not the truth of my existence.

But we live in the culture of the pep talk, whether it is directed towards us or not. Watching the next amazing teen on America’s Got Talent or whatever those shows are called now can be astounding entertainment, but also a reminder that most of us are not like that. Our mediocrity would make for bad TV. Excellence is largely a myth and it can be a very painful one for many. It is also a distraction from what is truly excellent about everyone and everything.

The modern cult of excellence is largely defined by our consumer economy. Excellence sells. Whether it’s on a television show or anything like that, there is always a message that if we found our unique thing it would have a unique place in the market. We would be productive, people would pay for it, like us, and we would be happy. This is largely, though, untrue. Most people discover that no matter their gift or talent, that thing they do, over and over, is work. Sometimes we like our work, and sometimes we don’t. A Picasso can finish a painting, consider it garbage, and even throw it away. Imagine: a Picasso in the trash!

While excellence is great and beauty is a cause for wonder, we do not rightly live as part of a marketing strategy. Within the market, we are almost all reduced to audience: to ticket-buyers, to shills for the card-sharps. It is not a way for us to live a life.

I have imagined a normal day in a normal life, but being filmed in high-definition, carefully edited and produced with a breathless narration by Sir David Attenborough or someone similar. As amusing as it might sound, the things that make up the content of The Blue Planet and other such creations are just as mundane as a normal day in the life of an octopus. However, the film work manages to pay attention in patient wonder at what would normally pass unnoticed.

Our lives are driven by false assumptions in which we become our own greatest disappointments, all the while wondering at the excellence of others. In truth, our lives may lack a certain sense of true wonder. We do not attend to the things that are most directly at hand. That which is uniquely proper to each of us is not our marketable skill—it is our very existence! That we do not rightly see our own existence means that we fail to rightly see the existence of others as well. We become like a movie audience in which all of the real people sit in the dark, unaware of one another, with the digital images dancing on the screen as the center of our short-term world.

I remember—gosh, it was years between high school and college—I had a friend. A number of us played guitar and wrote songs, and one of my friends wrote a song that said, “My life wouldn’t make a movie,” and I’ve always thought of that, of the lament that my life wouldn’t make a movie, as though what we saw on the screen was an example of real life or an example of what any of us would want a life to be.

Fr. Thomas Hopko, in his famous 55 maxims, mentions several times the need “to be small,” or, words to that effect. I would modify that somewhat by saying that we need to learn to be content, that contentment is a wonderful virtue. In our drive for excellence or constant improvement, we never bother to learn the skills of being content with anything. I have known people who were very set on a career ladder and had no idea what to do when they actually reached the top. They learned everything other than how to live.

St. Paul, though, uses the term “contentment” as a normative goal of the spiritual life. In his first letter to Timothy, his young protege, who has now been sent off to be a bishop, when Paul is writing to him, he says:

Now godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.

He is very sober here, understands how it is: We brought nothing into this world, and it’s certain we can carry nothing out. So he goes on and says:

And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows (1 Timothy 6:5-10).

That very much applies to us. He leaps from contentment to those who desire to be rich, and talks about the pitfalls associated with it.

Contentment, he says, as he uses the word, it has the meaning “having a sufficiency within yourself.” Avtarkeia is the word: to have enough within yourself. Elsewhere, in Philippians, Paul will write about his own experience:

For I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content.

And he’s actually writing this from prison, when he writes his letter to the Philippians, and from in prison he says:

I have learned in whatever state I am, to be content: I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound.

He knows how to have nothing and to deal with having a lot.

Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need (Philippians 4:11-12).

He’s learned contentment.

Contentment allows us to remain attentive to where we are, whether we abound or we are in need, and to pay attention to who we are: the truth, the unrepeatable truth of our existence. The drive of our culture always distracts us and focuses our attention to where we are not and to where we want to be. It wants us to sit idly by and watch the screen and pay the money and wish that we could be the stars of our own movie, but it creates an anxiety and makes our present life a distraction. The present is a marvelous place; it is also the place of the heart.

I’ll give you this quote which I love to quote—I’ve used it many times—from Macarius of Egypt. He says:

The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there are also lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. But there too is God, the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasuries of grace—all things are there. St. Macarius (H.43.7)

With that, the heart, we should be content. Glory to God!