fantasy v. reality

Some people have a way of abstracting their fantasies from everyday life, so that they can lose themselves in a fantasy world that is disconnected from the people and places that they know. This keeps the fantasies safe, in that the reality of life doesn't impinge on their possibilities; and it keeps everyday life safe, in that it isn't held up against the impossible standards that fantasies often set. Fantasies in this case become less of a judgment on one's life, and less of a vision of how one's life would look ideally, and more an escape, a diversion, a game, causing no harm, and with no possibility of realization.

I do not do this. I tie my fantasies to my everyday life. I want my everyday life to rise to the level of my fantasies, which of course can never happen. It is difficult for me to accept that life cannot be entirely fulfilling and moving and passionate all the time. It is difficult for me to accept that life must sometimes be mundane. I do not value the mundane.

What if one could feel fulfilled even in the mundane? In grocery shopping, in paying the bills, in sitting on hold with the phone company? This would mean, I think, being fulfilled just with the process of living. Life alone would be fulfilling, at least on some level. I imagine this would be the most consistent kind of contentment, one where life was always experienced as fulfilling (at some basic level) just because it is life, but where there were peaks of deeper fulfillment that came with the experiencing of certain actions.

This might be a pipe dream. Could I actually find somebody who feels this way? Maybe certain religious figures? But I think their contentment (if experienced in the way I just described) comes from devotion to Something Bigger. It's not contentment just from living itself, but from living towards something that they hold to be ultimate.

I do think that, fundamentally, the deepest fulfillment comes from the feeling that one's life is about something and the experience of spending one's life pursuing that which one feels his life is about. I don't think everyone gets to have this experience, especially if their basic needs are left unmet--food, clothing, shelter, etc. However, if basic needs are met, then questions of fulfillment come up, and I think that these can only be answered by giving people a chance to find something (or some things) that their lives can be about.