A childhood friend once told me that she thought I would never leave The Bronx, New York. She said I would live with my grandmother on University avenue forever. At the time, I thought of it as an insult, and for the record, she meant it as one.

Later on in life, I would engage in many conversations that would convince me that where I was and what I had was not enough. My biological mother, whom entered and exited my life frequently, once gifted me a book, inside it had a handwritten note that read, “the world is bigger than The Bronx.”

There is a version of me that not so long ago, would believe success and happiness was constantly attempting to climb up the corporate ladder, working to exhaustion and being disappointed in the form of denied promotions and a 2.4% annual pay increase. If the definition of hustle culture had a group photo under it, I would have be somewhere in the background. In my head, contentment reflected laziness and lack of motivation, in the gym, at work, even at home.

I can’t quite pinpoint when, but there was a moment where I found myself extremely anxious, frantically applying to jobs, frustrated because some random customer service person wasn’t being helpful and annoyed because my workout plan wasn’t giving me the results I was seeking. I had a layer of stress over my skin for absolutely no reason. I wasn’t looking for a job because I was unemployed, I am almost certain the customer service person was right and my body was fine, it wasn’t fitness model level but I was healthy.

I remember randomly taking a pause, standing still and looking around the room and realizing that I had e v e r y t h i n g I had ever asked for. There wasn’t a reasonable thing in my life that I didn’t have access to at that point in time. There I was, a person who prides themselves in her practice of gratitude forgetting that I was standing in my literal definition of enough angrily seeking more.

It was at that moment that I just stopped, I told my partner that I wanted to pause, I wanted to take more time to soak in how far we had gotten, the concept was foreign to him but he agreed, we gave ourselves permission to be content.

When people asked what was new, my response went from trying to prove that I was making moves to saying, nothing, life was good, it was the same, the same was great. I learned that contentment activates discomfort in others. Instead of absorbing peace, people will demand that you meet their angst and find ways to try to convince you that both yours and their very own existence as is, is not sufficient.

Contentment is not about living a boring life but living a life that you are able to savor in the moment, no matter where you are on the ladder or if you’re in your grandmother’s house, in The Bronx or you’re in a foreign country on holiday. It’s about letting go of this constant desire to leave the environment we arrive at before we’ve had a chance to enjoy it.

I am not alone in this notion, our social media feeds are fertile grounds for fairy tails of new beginnings and change. Our feeds reflect a common desire for doing less, for wanting less and for living more. Everywhere around us people are taking micro steps towards stillness.

I am not sure where you are in your life but take a moment, maybe it is enough. Maybe it’s time to give yourself consent to be content, life can be a beach if you let it.