Savoring Contentment

“Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment…” (1 Timothy 6:6).

Barbara Fredrickson continues her discussion of four emotion “families” by describing “contentment.”  She argues that contentment is more than mere “pleasure” in the moment.  Rather contentment, she asserts, “arises in situations appraised as safe and as having a high degree of certainty and a low degree of effort.”  When we are contented, we extend the momentary pleasure into a reflective stance that enhances our relationship with ourselves and the world around us.

Fredrickson’s description makes the following points:

·   Contentment is not mindless passivity.  Instead, real contentment leads to a deeper awareness of myself and the world around me, to “a mindful broadening of a person’s self-views and world-views.”
·  Contentment is the result of our experience of “flow” (we will come to the work of Mike Csikszentmihalyi downstream).
·   Contentment “creates the urge to savor and integrate recent events and experiences creating a new sense of self and a new world view.”

That third bullet point has produced a small sub-discipline (and consequent job security) for positive psychology researchers.  Fred B. Bryant and Joseph Veroff are the authors of the book, Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience (http://www.amazon.com/Savoring-New-Model-Positive-Experience/dp/0805851208).  If you want a practical application of their insights, you can watch Martin Seligman’s brief talk on how to spend less and savor more at Christmas in depressed economic times (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C7tTY4b0Pk).

Bryant and Veroff have tested the experience of savoring with thousands of undergraduate students (sometimes it seems that this is the chief reason to enroll students in large research universities—to have an adequate pool of test subjects).  They describe five techniques to encourage and facilitate the urge to savor.

·      Sharing the experience with others

·      Memory-building through actual, physical media and/or through intentionally preserving memories and mental images

·        Self-congratulation that takes pride in real accomplishments

·        Sharpening perceptions—that is, becoming a more educated and appreciative consumer of the pleasures in your life and creating the time and conditions to wring the maximum reward out of every pleasurable experience

·        Absorption, which is letting yourself go fully into the experience without judging the experience or moving on to the next moment.

If you think about the most pleasurable recollections you have, I suspect that some or all of these practices will have been part of forming those recollections.

One of the places where I have experienced such savoring has been on fishing trips to the Canadian wilderness.  I love catching fish and enjoy the “production” end of the process.  There comes a point in each trip, however, where that need to acquire big fish has been satisfied.  I can feel the mainspring of my spirit release, and then the savoring can begin.  The beauty of the lake becomes almost tangible.  My heart and breathing slow.  My awareness increases even as my thinking processes go quiet.  I am content, at rest, at peace, whole and slow.  Time nearly stops its movement.  God is enough.  The world is enough.  I am enough.

Where do you find contentment?