Can or can't you get no satisfaction?

Satisfaction. To be satisfied. To be content. To fulfill your desires.

I was asked recently to participate in creating something for a young adult that would help lift them up. An opportunity to provide a gift that would help them to fulfill their desires, to find contentment, to be satisfied.
The process raised the question, is satisfaction a pro or con? If satisfaction is contentment fulfilled and to be content is to be at ease then there's no favor in teaching satisfaction.
At ease.
At rest.
The opposite of how the universe works. It may not all be random (different argument) but it's never at ease. Shakespeare made a great living proving this very point so we'll assume the Great Bard knew a thing or two about how the world works. 

The trick then to help another soul find a way to fulfill their desires, to find satisfaction, without falling victim to contentment's allure.
This is where age brings a sense of scope to the problem. 

As a toddler if I turned in a circle three times while wishing for snow, I would confuse a snow storm that night as being caused by my actions. Correlation alone, two random events colliding to confuse reality. As a boy I had a few years understanding of how the world works. I knew that if I did this then that would happen. A basic understanding of causality usually resulting in my learning why I was told not to do something. Then we're thrown into early adulthood and all that shit is just great cafe talk as we try to make a start on a 1000 calories a day and enough beer money for the weekend.
I think we often forget what an amazing time that is in our lives. We argue the reality of causality and logic while secretly hoping a series of random events will bring us the perfect lover or lead us on an epic random adventure. The birthplace of philosophy. Trying to describe our passion for random correlation through the logic of causality. There's a reason most of the best art, poetry, ideas and passions occur from fifteen to twenty five. As we age beyond those years we remember the stumbling attempts at bravery that led to failure far more than the fewer beautiful moments of a successful night of epic love or adventure. 

We begin to steer our lives down the path of least resistance. There's more at stake. We develop our dogma and fall into our patterns. Banishing randomness. Living more for the next day ten years down the road rather than the moment when you catch the scent of the perfume your first love wore as you walk across a room or when you hear the song that will define your generation for the first time. You've found stability, contentment and ease.

But at our core all of us still long for that first new experience. The first kiss. The first moment you got away with breaking a rule. The first time you knew you were with a kindred spirit. We've built entire industries around trying to recapture those moments. The oldest and second oldest professions are based on it. 

I don't know about the next stages of how the world seems to unfold but I have an idea from watching aging parents and grandparents that things still stay interesting. 

So what to provide a young adult that would help to raise them up. To help them to fulfill their desires without falling into contentment before experiencing the magic of that time in life when we know the weight that our actions have consequences but we still hope that next moment will bring a new marvelous adventure. 

Like I said before, age provides perspective here.

Only a love story would do. A story that demonstrates the importance of those random moments while not forgetting what those moments were trying to tell us. Most people think love stories begin and end with the first pangs of passion and end with the two lovers entwined but that's not the case. Fact is most love stories are long tales of random moments that pushed the participants into the arms of their lovers over miles and years. We pull a girls pigtails on the playground and then make an ass of ourselves in high school. Somehow the universe managed to have the right two people in the right places to make the connection. 

I decided I would share my story with this young adult. The story of twenty years of random correlations that led to two people finally finding their kindred spirit and the causality of the next twenty years as we figured out the other person and prepared the way for our children to find their own way in the world. 

I don't know you're story of how or if you've found your love but I can guarantee if there was any story of how many random encounters you could have with someone before realizing that this was truly your other half we're close to winning some universal award for either density or stubbornness. 

There's nothing to inspire youth like a story of love and nothing to ground them more than to realize its true. 

So I've put my story down for my oldest daughter to read. Hopefully she'll take more away from it than that her dad was basically a jackass and her mom really had poor taste in dating before stumbling across me for the hundredth time over twenty years. I'm not saying I was any better than those that came before me. I'm just saying I wasn't willing to ignore the previous twenty years of correlation that led me to the fact that I had found my partner. Correlation did in fact lead to causation and that's my philosophy on love.