Life is not a means to an end, it is in itself complete and joyful. The reason we grow up believing otherwise is that children are never encouraged to do a thing for itself.
We socialize children to work for ‘A’s on their report card and not because learning is in itself meaningful, interesting or enjoyable. Later in life young people are taught to adopt careers that bring them security. The result is that they don’t work because their work means something, or is fulfilling in itself, but for the paycheck at the end of the month. Very few people today are doing something at work they would choose to do if they weren’t getting paid for it, and they spend their whole lives at it.
Life then becomes a means to an end and in itself becomes meaningless, lonely, empty. From childhood our attention is trained to be on what’s around the corner, on there and not on here, on what more we should have, what we “need” to be happy. From that we see life through a screen of our own expectations, thoughts and fears rather than seeing things as they are.
To really taste, see, smell and feel life, in other words to be fully alive, is to give our complete attention to what is in front of us right now. And the only way we would give our complete attention to what is in front of us, and not what is around the corner, is to feel in your bones that this moment is complete in itself. Only then can one be at peace inwardly, still inwardly, and therefore be fully present and at contentment.