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Streams of Contentment by Robert J. Wicks Robert J Wicks is well known for his books Riding the Dragon and Crossing the Desert. His new book, Streams of Contentment: Lessons I Learned on My Uncle’s Farm will surprise with the candid tales of summers spent on his uncle’s farm in upstate New York. As Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world with the bulk of our population living in cities with a population of more than one million people, the musings, advice and simple instructions in this book will resonate! With his characteristic charm and insight, Wicks offers a simple prescription for finding contentment, to recognise that a little silence and solitude is no small thing and to discover the surprising power of humility. See page 10.
“As a youngster raised in the city, I learned about the need to be all that I could be in life. I was told to expand my horizons, be willing to risk failure by reaching higher and higher. Rejection had to be faced. Accepting what was ‘a sure bet’ was not good enough. Given my personality I responded to this challenge even though I felt failure keenly. I remember trying my hand at writing a weekly column in high school (all copies of which I now hope have been burned). Other steps of this process of risking included becoming a Marine Corps officer, marrying someone I felt was much more spiritually mature that I was, applying to a doctoral program that I knew was going to accept only seven candidates out of the 360 who applied, writing books for respected publishers, going into Cambodia to work with persons trying to help the Khmer people rebuild their country after years of terror and torture, and working with physicians, nurses and psychologists treating returning, critically injured military personnel at Walter Reed Army Hospital. As I look back I see that I did take the risk to be who I could be. I did deal with failure upon failure on this road even though I felt it deeply since I
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am so thin-skinned. However, I now realise that taking the risk to be in over my head and not settle for less, is not – as I thought it was in the past – the most important risk I would need to take to live fully. Whereas I learned to appreciate the first risk in the intense competitive environment of New York City, the seeds of how to approach the second risk were planted in the country. I experienced in the rural people a different pace of life each summer and a style of living that many of us in the city might consider as quite basic and unworthy of any real gratitude or excitement. Eating a hot breakfast, doing the hard work baling hay and moving it into the barn, running to see a cow’s calving process that went off without a problem, falling asleep while sitting under a tree watching the sun set, or enjoying a glass of homemade hard cider on a Friday evening with family and friends from another farm are only a few of the available gifts that we valued in the country. Quite possibly they would be “no big deal” to others. I also felt this difference on one of the my trips to lecture in Newfoundland. I had a sense of knowing that the movements of the seasons didn’t just mean a change in clothes but that life was something beautiful, if only I had the eyes to appreciate the gifts of each season, I needed to learn again and again the value of looking out the window in the morning and seeing what is – not moaning about what it could or should be. I had been presented with the lens of simplicity and contentment early in life; now I just had to know when to periodically pick it up again, I think I have done this in many conscious ways, and my desire with this book is to share these experiences and the principles that I learned from them with you no matter where you physically live.”
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