I've been thinking about contentment a lot lately. What got me started down this path was a comment from my brother-in-law's partner. She looked at some pictures on my phone and commented about how small my screen was. This was the second time she had made a similar remark. There was nothing malicious in her words, she just has a phone with a larger screen than mine, so the difference was noticeable to her.
Here's the thing about me: For most things in life, I don't like change. Some of it is frugality. I don't want to spend money on a new phone, car, clothes, etc if they are reliably serving the purpose they are supposed to be providing. Some of it is just resistance to change. I like some things to stay the same, most of the time. I do believe in changes when it improves the way things are done. And some of it is because I'm trying to tread a little lighter on the Earth when I can.
I'm very content with my phone. It's an iPhone 5 that I got in 2013. I just did the latest updates. OK, my phone has been trying to get me to update for over a year now, and I've been resisting. (There's that resistance to change thing. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.) I finally updated it this past weekend because my husband wanted me to download Google Keep so we could share shopping lists, and I had to have a newer version to run the app. So far I am very happy with the changes. I intend to keep my phone until it stops working or simply cannot keep up with the technology for apps I want to use.
But when the comment was made about my screen being small, oh, it planted a seed of discontentment. Gee, I never noticed that my screen is small. Maybe I need something bigger? That, combined with my husband telling me I should get a newer phone, made me briefly think that I did indeed need one. I browsed my phone provider's website. Thankfully I pulled back before I could click "upgrade." I have complete contentment with my phone.
The idea of contentment also applies to many other things in my life: my Prius that has over 140,000 miles on it and is 8 years old (paid cash for it new and hope to pay cash for the next one), the clothes that I wear year after year because they are comfortable and still presentable (I hate shopping for clothes), my laptop (several years old and is a little slow but still works fine.) Sheets that might have a hole in them, but not in a spot where our feet catches on it, towels that are unraveling on an edge, an ice maker that no longer works but we have ice trays and it doesn't bother us so who cares?
There's nothing wrong with change when you want it and it makes you happy. We are not all environmentally aware, and I'm not here to judge anybody over that. But I do wish we could all be more content with what we have.
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