Contentment, Felicity, and Tiny Vacations

Finding a "fuller harvest of satisfactions"

“But contentment is more durable than excitement or the quick thrill and, like rich soil that has been given necessary fallow time, may equip a person for a fuller harvest of satisfactions and a longer period of productivity than the synthetic quick fix of instant satisfaction.

But felicity includes something beyond simple contentment. Felicity not only accepts what is, acknowledging and cheerfully submitting to the limitations of one’s condition; it also unabashedly wills and seeks pleasure. Its pleasures are more subtle than sensational.

— Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, by Marilyn McEntyre

The sun has come out in Oregon and we have all crept from the woods, facing it like refugees from Plato’s cave. It’s been an unsettlingly dry winter and maybe it’s a sign of my age, but I worry about the summer heat. I am concerned for our forests, our rivers, our homes. It was just six years ago that our region was devastated by forest fires, and every year there is a level of fire damage. Yet we all become our best selves when the sun shines in the PNW.

It was 82° Wednesday. Town was packed with people buying spring essentials: potting soil, primroses and sweet peas, gardening gloves. The cynical among us noted the likelihood of snow still to come—our “snowmaggedon” came in late February 2019, and other snow storms have hit as late as April—and the realists among us recognize the need for snowpack. We need some reserves. It’s too hot, too dry, too early.

I am more concerned about these things than I used to be. As I age, it’s hard to know if my concerns have shifted because I have fewer people in my immediate care, and therefore more time to notice and worry about the world outside my home (which is where all those people I revolved around half my life now live), or if the things I am concerned about have actually become bigger deals, worthy of more concern. Wars, rumors of wars, a warming earth, early deaths¹, corruption, deception, and that insistent ache in my lower back.

Or it’s possible my focus has been hijacked.

It’s no secret that our collective attention has been recruited by the highest bidders all over the internet, and the more time you spend online or with people who spend a lot of time online, the more niched your attention becomes. I remember several years ago asking one of our daughters if she’d seen the ads for such-and-such a thing on Instagram. She had not. I was baffled she’d never even heard of this thing, because it was everywhere on Instagram, and that’s when I learned how the algorithm had defined me into a box, based on my searches and likes and saves.²

Few things annoy me as much as being defined and boxed up. Today I am interested in owls and exercises for low back pain and why there are so many women named Mary in Jesus’ story, but do not assume that is all I care about. Do not even assume I will care about those things tomorrow.

I have always been fairly “lowkey”, but for whatever reason, midlife has me more concerned in general. “The scope of concerns has widened,” you could say, with a wide sweep of the arms.

But the joy of a seasoned life has also deepened. That’s what I really wanted to write about.

The Old Oak, 1870 , Jules Dupré

The contentment and felicity Marilyn McEntyre writes about in Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies feel like beautiful features in a life full of bugs, and when heartache, physical pain, worry, or cynicism loom like shadows on the cave walls, contentment helps leads me out, rather than keeping me stuck. Felicity establishes me in the season and time and place God has allowed for me, with eyes to see his goodness.

Life has to be boiled down. Time gets thicker, moments make memories, I can forget the fret of how everything can change in an instant and now becomes just wonderful as it is, with these people and this dog and the sun shining through dirty windows. I feel contentment when I notice small things. When I remember how life is made up of the miniscule. Stack up tiny treasures long enough and they become a “harvest of satisfactions”.

It’s about my attention.

Tim and I took a glorious vacation³ in January. Since then, I have been paying more attention to how small moments can feel the same as that time away, minus the white sand. I have been celebrating Tiny Vacations when we are together on a Saturday and have hours to use as we please; when we eat a good meal alone or with friends; in the mornings when it is still dark and quiet and we pretend there are no demands. This is the contentment and felicitous joy of a long marriage, and I don’t take it for granted that we enjoy each other’s company so much. I know many marriages feel like that cave, an entrapment, and I don’t claim that we have worked harder or been more faithful, and therefore, more blessed by God. We have worked hard. We have tried to be faithful to God’s work in our lives. We are blessed. But none of life is a formula, not even for people of faith.

“Felicity comes in lively, sustained conversation; in long walks on which one notices small changes in the landscape; in the silent companionship of an old friend or partner; in serving a good dinner to a family one loves. Felicity seeks happiness actively, but its actions are quiet and measured rather than flamboyant and impulsive. It deepens by having reflected enough on one’s own good to realize that one’s own good consists in appreciation and service of others.”

—McEntyre

I think felicity takes work, which might take the form of setting limits on myself. Less information, more formation. For me it will be a discipline of enjoying the sun today without worrying what it might mean for the future.

Here is a Tiny Vacation I invite you into, in the hopes that you recover some of your own felicity and contentment:

• Spend two minutes looking at the painting in this post, by Jules Dupre. Study the details and the motion and the colors (oh the colors!).

• Close your eyes and recreate the painting in your mind. Imagine yourself there.

• Ask yourself a dozen questions about the scene.

• Then go out into your day noticing your life in that same way.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever. Psalm 23:6 ESV

1. “Early death” is a whole subject in itself. What is too early? When does death feel like it was on time?

2. As the Women of the Original Blogging Boom have aged into the middle years, have you noticed how popular talk of perimenopause, menopause, HRT, and empty nesting has become? I know the algo is at play, as well as updates in research and language around these issues. But I wonder if this is causation or correlation? I have aged with these women online, so I notice the shift.

3. From the latin vacatio: leisure, freedom, exemption, a being free from duty, immunity earned by service.