Confusing Complacency with Contentment

I will never forget my theory and analysis professor at VCU. She was a feisty but lovable woman and she never sugar-coated anything. One particular morning when she was handing back graded assignments, she came around to me and I immediately saw the B- in the upper right-hand corner. I breathed an inaudible sigh of relief. Then I flipped the paper over and there it was, scrawled in fierce, barely legible red ink:

Kristin, you are riding the coattails of your own talent and doing just enough to get by. I'm not impressed.


Talk about having the wind knocked out of you. Like a child getting the "I'm so disappointed in you" talk by their parents, at that precise moment, I wished she would have just gone ahead and given me an F. Not only had I not given it my best, I had been called out for it. I remember that I tried not to think about it for the rest of the day, but it stuck with me. She wasn't someone who knew me particularly well, yet if it was that painfully obvious to her that I wasn't truly giving myself over to something, I wondered what the other people in my life who did know me, see?

Nearly seven years later, I still think about that remark. I've often wondered why it stuck with me (other than the simple fact that we always tend to replay the negatives more than the positives). It was just an assignment- certainly not even a pivotal one at that. I think it carried so much weight, though, because it spoke to something much deeper in me than just a temporary moment of slacking off. Instead, I had developed a posture of complacency.

The problem is that in our culture, we confuse complacency with contentment. Contentment is defined as "enjoyment of whatever may be desired" or simply having enough. Complacency, on the other hand, is defined as "being contented" but "to a fault."

Take a balloon, for example. A balloon can be blown up, inflated, stretched. But it has limits. If those limits are blatantly disregarded, there is usually a loud pop. (In our world, we might call this breakdown). Contentment could be illustrated as a fully-inflated balloon- reaching its full potential, but not exceeding it. Complacency, then, is a balloon that thinks it's been blown up to it's full size when in fact, it hasn't even been stretched at all. It's not even aware that it could be so much more, but it's content to stay the way it is because as we all know, stretching can hurt. And there is always a risk that maybe you could stretch too much and then there might be irreparable damage. Or failure. Complacency likes to sit on the sidelines because, well, it's just safer that way.

If you've ever found yourself saying things like, "What does it REALLY matter?" or "it's not worth it," or "It's okay because no one else is doing it either," I hate to break it to you, but you're settling. And I only know this because I've said it far too much in my life. The reason my professor's words stung so many years ago is because she hit on a truth about myself that I didn't want to acknowledge- a truth that couldn't simply be fixed by turning back around and handing in an A + worthy project. It would involve pushing into something bigger than myself, something uncomfortable and unknown. It would mean changing my entire way of thinking.

So I did. I changed my perspective and everything has been awesome since then.

What, you don't believe me? Good. Because that's not how it works. (I wish). Things have been awesome, but they've also been downright hell-ish at times, too.

There is no one-time quick fix for complacency. And I wish I could say that it is (and was) only relegated to academia, but it extends far beyond into my marriage, my parenting decisions, my music, teaching, and writing. For some odd reason, I operated under the assumption that I would grow up, get married and become a mommy, and when I did, I would magically morph into someone who was no longer prone to complacency. But if anything, it's an even tougher battle now than it was when I was 21, especially since I have so much more on my plate than I did then. Instead, I got married, became a mommy and now I'm having to grow up. There are simply too many things that keep me busy, numb, and ultimately chasing my own tail and unfortunately, it's these things often get more of my attention than the things that really matter.

I can honestly say that most days, I just want to be comfortable. So much so, that I've gotten quite good at letting myself off the hook from everything from working out to writing...to letting the kids watch too much TV...to driving by the homeless guy at the nearby intersection and pretending not to notice. The truth that I act like belongs to everyone else but me is very simple, yet inescapable: I'm not called to be comfortable. Lots of times, this goes against everything I act upon in my day-to-day life. We're all creatures of comfort, to some extent or the other. But we're supposed to take risks. We're made to face fears and confrontations (whether good or bad) and come out better for them. We're built to love others more than ourselves. If we're lucky, we might embrace that early enough in our lives to act on it.

It's easy for me to think that my story is all about being a wife and a mommy and while I know that's undeniably a huge and very important piece to the puzzle, there's more. Lately, I've been wondering how much my tunnel vision has affected my way of thinking. What does it look like to live into a bigger story? What are you giving yourself to (for better or perhaps, for worse) this holiday season?