The Good Things in Life

Mark J. Janssen
4 min readDec 6, 2024

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We want the best cushions sewn with gold thread and embroidered with silver and purple threads. Jewel encrusted, of course.

We want the finest foods, the best cuts of meats and the rarest of caviar. We want the richest cuisines while not gaining an ounce or becoming flabby.

We want the softest sheets, the best cars and houses, the friends who will never leave and the spouse who will always be faithful.

We insist upon safety and security. We must always be unharmed and protected from outside intruders and inner demons. We want and want and want still more.

In the process of all of our wanting, all of our childish demands, we forget the truly good things we already enjoy in life.

This is admittedly a frightening time to be alive. Not only in the USA, Canada and Mexico, but all around the world. There are political upheavals. Economic and financial instability appear to be running amok.

What we’re not paying attention to is that we thought the same thing ten and twenty years ago. Somewhere or other in this world there is a Chicken Little squawking about the horrible state of the world. There’s this problem here, that war there, an economy appearing to be flushed down the river over there.

The fact of the matter is that life will never be perfect. There will always be problems great and small. The question is what are we doing about ourselves.?

Maybe we can help fix the problems of the world. We can vote. If we live someplace where we have to drive, we can study up before we buy our vehicles. When we do choose a car or truck, we choose something that is safe. We want something that has a good safety record. Once upon a time when I was young I loved cars that were fast and flashy. I loved ripping up country roads as fast as I could, tearing around tight corners and plowing through standing water and snow. If there was a blizzard to drive through, there was an adrenaline rush to be had I as there. Somewhere along the line I changed. I slowed down and began to drive more cautiously. I wanted cars that were safe and efficient so I could save money on gas and repairs. I began to think just like my parents. Imagine that!

We have this same ability with every purchase we make, not just the vehicles we drive. It’s the same with the clothes we wear, the food we eat and our other possessions.

Part of that, quite likely a very large part of the change, had as much or more to do with my interior life changing as the fact that I was moving into middle age.

My life was altered. Remaining interested in politics, finance and the world in general didn’t change. What changed was that I found myself transformed for the better when I breathed deeply. I slowed down from a pace where I was constantly on the run. No longer did I feel responsible for everyone and everything. There was no evidence that folks appreciated my prior attempts to control them and their lives. At that point I realized that I needed to take care of myself, not the rest of the world.

I began to turn inward to a greater extent than in my younger years.

It gradually became clear that life doesn’t always feel safe. It never has and never will. In learning our true place in the world we come to see that you can’t open a flower with a hammer. Life will work out the way it works out. We can help make life better or we can continue to want and demand and eventually make ourselves unhappy. In my experience there are some folks who like to spread their displeasure with their lives to see how many other people they can make miserable.

We can choose not to do that. We don’t have to be those people. We are able to look around and discover other things about ourselves.

We each possess a clear spiritual consciousness of God.

We have the ability to use our consciousness to decide what kind of life we will have. We are all in situations every day where we have to look at where we are in the present moment and decide where we want to be in the next. Which of us is blind to what is going on around us? Maybe someone does behave badly towards me. At one time I would have challenged that person. More often nowadays I find myself ignoring them. There’s something that comes up from way down deep inside and looks at the situation for a couple minutes to figure out whether or not it’s worthwhile being upset. As often as not I can give the matter a couple of minutes and then I start to drift off. If there’s an interesting book to read, music to listen to or work to be done, then it’s time to move forward with life.

Who needs to have their serenity or, at the very least, the calm they feel in communing with their morning cup of joe, disrupted by outside unpleasantness?

It has long been my belief that one of the very best ways to meditate is to sit with a hot cup of coffee or tea and think of absolutely nothing. I let life go. I become unconscious of my surroundings, whether I am in a coffee shop, my home or, a few lucky times, riding a train across the country. Whether staring out the window or into the depths of the liquid, I forgot that I was supposed to exist as a man with cares and worries. I forgot I had problems.

The world disappeared and that was the very best thing in life.

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Mark J. Janssen
Mark J. Janssen

Written by Mark J. Janssen

Mark Janssen is a Catholic Druid, mystic visionary and author who writes a weekly blog. His memoir “Reach for the Stars” is available online.

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