Attaining contentment

Resting contentedly

When I chose the name for this blog, I was undecided between Senior Happiness and Senior Contentment. Essentially I wanted to try to help people, especially seniors, find or re-find the happiness in their lives. But I decided on Senior Contentment because I came to feel that containment, while a possible synonym for happiness, implied more than happiness.

In the first post, I listed a lot of synonyms for contentment. They included: satisfaction, gratification, fulfillment, happiness, pleasure, cheerfulness, ease, comfort, well-being, peace, equanimity, serenity, and tranquility.

After having read these synonyms a few times, I felt that their entirety was much greater than a lot of individual words that could be used instead of the word contentment.

If I change those words from nouns to adjectives, I can say that there is nothing more that I want than to feel satisfied, gratified, fulfilled, happy, pleased, cheerful, easy, comfortable, peaceful, equanimous, serene, and tranquil. And certainly then I would find myself in a state of well-being (no adjective for that phrase that I can find), or – and here we are back at the blog’s title – completely contented.

I’m much too much of a realist to be considered a Pollyanna and I don’t believe for a minute that I, and most others, are able to be completely contented all the time or even most of the time for that matter. But I do believe that there is much that most of us can do that will allow us to feel a sense of contentment much more often than we regularly do.

And so, in the next few postings, I am going to focus in on those adjectives and discuss what we can do to help ourselves more frequently attain the states that they imply.