Contentment...to be satisfied with what you contain; to be contained is to be content. Interesting word I feel because there's also an element of control within this power of contentment. An ability to be able to control oneself despite what is put in the way.
It's obviously an emotion but yet can be reflected in action - I'm so embedded in the sustainability trip at the moment, considering it's been a major focus of my studies over several years as well as my lifestyle - I can't help but see the connection that having just enough leads to just being in abundance. To control one's urges to consume is to control one's cravings and desires and leads to a balanced mind (yes, there are Buddhist overtones here but there's a lot of value in it!). True contentment.
I'm challenged by this because I'm surrounded by, I suppose, false abundance - the fancy cars (c'mon, do we need Hummers? Weren't they just built for the military?), the obscene variety of choice in the supermarkets (how many different choc-chip cookies do we need to have?), and the plethora of gadgets to keep our minds focused on supposedly important or maybe just entertaining activities that seriously distract us from the main goal in life - to be content. I'm challenged because I see that there is purpose in all that false abundance, for a little while at least. But the main game stays playing in the background and it'll take some time when the focus shifts back to living contentedly.
Once the oil runs out, it'll get interesting. Then when the coal is all consumed it'll get really interesting. Finally, once the uranium is all dug up, depleted and reburied, well.....
Philip G. Gallman, in Green Alternatives and National Energy Strategy: the facts behind the headlines (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), put all that to about 200 years. 200 years...ok, I'm not going to be around to see that but that is a blink of the eye for Nature, and there'll still be our descendents traipsing around just like this:
And so what happens? I don't profess to have the answers but living simply is key. It' supposed to be easy isn't it? But damn it's hard...
I can't help but be bemused yet furious about this observation:
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue – that avarice is a vice, that the extraction of usury is a misdemeanor, and the love of money is detestable, that those who walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom [are those] who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin...But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul itself is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight (Keynes 1963[1930]:371-2).
Yep, 1930, in the wake of the Great Depression, and hot onto another global war, it still rings true today because we're still in Keynes' time-frame. Damn it!
Ah, but it's all good, we've got Second Life, Wii, the X-Box, iPhones, the plasma screens...it's ok, technology will get us out of this, won't it?
Somehow, just finding a spot on the side of a hill with a freshwater creek running nearby, growing some veggies is really where it's at. Isn't that something like what Captain America concluded in Easy Rider? That the new American (read Western) Dream was found amongst those hippies slogging it out trying to grow a decent crop in crappy, stony soil?
Mmm...the quest for the hill of contentment....
John Maynard Keynes, 1963, Essays in
Persuasion, Norton, New York.
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