Content Adult

I mentioned before about the range of ability in the group of us skiing. A couple of the guys came back on the first day saying that they had skied the whole area and were going to drive off and use other resorts. One of the group, in particular, was pleased to have got back alive having slithered tentatively round the local slopes.

Being somewhere in the middle, I wonder who is happier?

Part of me looks back to the process of learning to ski with nostalgia. It was fun and exciting. Part of me looks at the experts with green-tinged-goggles.

Actually, though, I am just loving what I am able to do. It really doesn’t matter to me what others can find to enjoy, in the sense that there is plenty for all. I am content; and that is a real gift.

I think it is a discipline that I need to practise, and I suspect I am not alone. Contentment in all things is a gift, a discipline and an art. Yet what is true here is true in life, isn’t it? There is so much in which we can take joy if we choose to.

We took our children to stay in a shanty town in South Africa last year. My daughter pulled me over to her at one point and quietly asked me why the children were smiling so much. I could see her logic. They have so little and in their place we would be utterly dejected and miserable. What have they to celebrate.

Yet, of course, they have something we have so often lost: the gift of joy in what they have rather than misery at what they don’t.

Contentment… now there’s a thing.