Contentious Contentment

There was a feeling my mind could remember but my body couldn’t recall.  I pined for its return, but only more deeply felt its loss.
This is contrast.

It had to return, somehow.  I knew it couldn’t be lost and gone forever, I just had to figure out how to summon its re-birth throughout every cell in my body.
Which is far easier to type out than it is to muster up.

I placed the intention: “I want to feel that contentment that I so loved before.”

It wasn’t as though I hadn’t been content recently.  I was comfortable.  I was calm.  My life was going in the exact right direction, as though my compass had finally been set properly for the first time in my life.  Yet the contentment resisted me.  There were still so many challenges.  So many stressors.  So many things that weren’t making life easy for me.
There was always something.

Before long, having placed the intention, it was inevitable that the fruit of my desires would return to me.  And it did:  I felt contentment again as thoroughly as I could wish for.

Waves of relief rippled over me.
The tides had changed again.
Through every movement, every breath, every experience.
The lens of contentment bathed me in its calm, quiet glory.

Though, I’m not entirely certain what it is that motivated this change– intention is wonderful but without action, is useless.  When I master this game, I will have figured out precisely which actions and thoughts accommodated my intention that resulted in this brilliant transformation.
Until then, I am merely a young scientist, trying to rule out extraneous variables.
A young magician learning the proper fluctuation for my incantations.

I intend for this feeling to hang around for quite a while now, though it seems that sometimes emotions like these are rarely within the control of the expressor.

As much as intention is magical, and as much as we can choose what it is that our life is like, emotions often have their own minds about them– and may be fleeting, or merely tied to us by chemical responses that seemingly have no rhyme or reason about them.

Sometimes I wonder if these feelings aren’t much like electrons in that you can not know both where they’re at AND where they’re going.
You can know one.
Or the Other.
Not both.
As soon as you turn to face them, they’ve disguised themselves into lowly pleasantries and how-do-you-do’s.   Hiding their grandeur and magnificence, perhaps out of fear that thieves might steal the beauty away in the night, leaving you feeling distraught and discontent.
The contrast, you see.