This is a guest post by Mark, blogger at Soul Shelter

“A thing is sometimes added to by being diminished and diminished by being added to.” — Tao Te Ching (XLII; 96)

Coffee Cup
Generally these days, we Americans aren’t too good at moderation. While certain episodes in our national history (frontier settlement, The Great Depression, and the lean times of rationing during WWII) remind us that ours is a heritage of toughness and sacrifice, the modus operandi in our contemporary age of prosperity entails eating, shopping, driving, working, and being entertained — all in excess.

This puts us in stark cultural contrast to other thriving western nations. Take France, whose people work less, vacation more, and enjoy higher rates of personal fitness. Most coffee drinkers in France, heirs to the world’s finest café culture, find the demitasse espresso sufficient for their morning pick-me-up. In the States, on the other hand, we demand triple-shot double-grande caramel macchiatos. And where the French café-goer takes his coffee in cup and saucer because he values sitting as much as sipping, the American gets his grande on the go, the enormous paper cup a product of his perpetual motion (and a wasteful one at that).

We lack moderation not only in our styles of ingestion and consumption, but in our tireless ambition. Success is the holiest deity of our national cult — and our fixation upon success is, of course, good and bad.

I am certainly not without ambitions. Abundant opportunity and good ol’ fashioned bootstrapping self-reliance appeal to me as much as to the next guy. In fact, I’ve spent the last eight years, virtually without pause, in thrall to my own dreams and aspirations. I regret none of that time, and have achieved my own modicum of success — and an even greater deal of fulfillment. Hard work and dogged perseverance certainly have their place.

But recently, while chatting across the back fence with a neighbor about our impending parenthood, my wife and I were the beneficiaries of some lovely (and unconventional) advice: “Lower your expectations.”

With this wise directive our neighbor, a fulltime parent of two youngsters, was encouraging us to be realistic about our own goals once our baby arrived — in other words, to practice moderation in our personal ambitions. Lower expectations, our neighbor advised, would help us “stay sane,” and would keep us in the moment.

The advice, so wonderfully unique, has stayed with me. I’ve long advocated moderation where the dining table, the wallet, the automobile, or the church was concerned. But as for practicing moderation in my vocation, I could do better. I could strive to better balance work and life. I could take care to see that my passion doesn’t become compulsion. And what better time to seek such moderation than during the first months of my first-born’s life, when there’s so much happening that I don’t want to miss?

So I’m working on it. I’m reminding myself, daily, of the value (counterintuitive as it may be) in sometimes lowering my expectations, in not demanding so awfully much of myself.

Lao Tzu, the sage author of the Tao Te Ching, puts it this way:

“Too much store
Is sure to end in immense loss.
Know contentment
And you will suffer no disgrace;
Know when to stop
And you will meet with no danger.
You can then endure.” (XLIV; 108)

Here’s to heeding Lao Tzu and “knowing contentment…”

Creative Commons License photo credit: elusive.

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