Contentment

 

 

It's always an interesting debate, the quality of our lives today compared to when we were young. 

There is always a question of the rose tinted special effect as we look back through time seeming and remembering only the most striking, only the most pleasing and burying the bad. Today in comparison we have our current lives, the good and the bad, side by side competing for our attention. Never the less there has been a sea change in the society we grew up in, a different philosophy as to the way we live, assumptions today we never carried in our heads 50 years a go. 

There is always an attempt to evaluate which was better, which was more satisfying, which held that crucial human desire, contentment.

Contentment is different to pure happiness it is more subtle, usually more sustaining and offers a better perspective. Happiness they say is fleeting, it comes and goes with emotion, it often relies on outside influence and is usually a spike in our daily lives. Contentment on the other hand comes from a more pacifying part of our temperament, the part which views things in the whole, the large sustaining the small so that we arrive at a composite - contentment.

What is it which produces this sense of calm in our everyday lives, a sense of having arrived instead of the struggle "too" arrive. To a large part it's the scale of our sensitivity and the awareness that most of our compatriots within the society we live are much of a muchness, the same as ourselves and that the scale of achievement is realisable in all of us. 

Of course in working class environments it took the form of common pleasures and was largely devoid of competition. It was not a trail of achievement usually mimicking the middle class obsession of "getting on", a short hand for "making money". 

Making money had a scale, the scale reflected your needs, your needs were ascribed to what you valued and without the artificial stimulant of advertising to push you into buying things you would never imagine needing, life was simple, very simple. 

It's amazing how simply we lived in those days, happy to walk or cycle between places, the bus or occasionally the train were for events further afield but usually our lives were carried out within a small compass and perhaps this myopic lifestyle drew us closer together to our own recognisable kith and kin. 

Imagine the difference between this close boundary existence and today's Internet extravaganza with its untold connections, many of them illusory most of them foreign to our way of life and yet they provide a continual, sometimes disruptive variance of what we have and hold dear, to what we see and hear through our laptop. Where is the contentment, where is the peace that comes from recognising, as a society which we have developed, our environment to suite ourselves, to sustain our way of life and compliment our desires.

The need to absorb so much that is foreign on the assumption that foreign is best that foreign is good for you that your indigenous ways are behind the times and need a dose of 'the foreign'.
Much of our society is now foreign compared to the days when I was a lad. Much of the myriad culture we see on our streets is new and whilst it is possible to assimilate a sketchy knowledge of the people and their proclivity, it is still and will remain foreign.

Perhaps that's it. We have become a part of the flotsam and jetsam of a society which prides itself on being foreign. The excitement of going on a overseas holiday and entering a zone of foreign influence was always a subliminal thrill in that you were never sure what would happen next. You were out of your comfort zone and the unexpected became the expected. 

Behind the faces on our high streets and inside the cultural buildings which house the root of their being we have become foreign and all the fears of the implausibility of the passport zone are visited upon us each day.