Being Content

We live in a time when many folk feel extreme pressure in being measured by what they own.  The latest smart phone, the most gadgets to help organize their lives.  Where homes tend to look more like displays from catalogs or glossy magazines than places to find comfort, joy and family closeness.  We seem to be loosing our need to build stronger families but spend hours building networks of people we will never meet face to face and that's not all bad, but in perspective, if we are not close to our immediate family members, perhaps we should cultivate those relationships first.   I watched some video clips of the History of Boston yesterday and over and over, people talked about how "content" they were in the olden days  (30's-50's) with so little.
A 5 cent apple was a great treat.  If families were poor, the children didn't seem to realize it because the fun they had in play was free.  A day at the beach..no need for fancy beach equipment, an old blanket and a peanut butter sandwich sufficed. Playing ball in the vacant lot.  Cleaning up Mrs O'Connor's yard for her.
On a hot summer day, just reading under the tree in the back yard.  Winter was spent skating on Spot Pond or sledding in the cemetery.  All free, all fun and some of life's fondest memories.  Contentment was a feeling felt each and every day.    Mothers were content to just visit the neighbor for a cup of coffee, no need to go some expensive coffee shop to chat.  Home was perfect, you could be right next door watching for the children to come home and build a relationship that involved home life.   My mother and grandmother spent many an hour chatting over the fence with our neighbor as they both hung up laundry on Monday mornings.  Clothes lines were near fence lines just for that reason.   My mother learned new recipes from visiting her friends while they cooked and vice versa.  Contentment was normal.  No one I knew growing up, had their houses redecorated every 7 years because of styles changing.  You got a new couch when the old one was falling apart.  Even our wealthy friends and family lived that way.   Of course Old Yankee families tend to be practical and not into showing off, even if they owned half of Boston.  
These days, we seem to have lost our ability to be content.  We are always shopping for more, more of anything and everything.  People have storage buildings, rent storage space, have garages so full there is no room for the car, yet they still shop for more, trying to fill some void that cannot be filled with stuff.   Our stuff   is not meeting our needs but we don't stop to figure that out, that Golden Ring is always dangling in front of us, trying to seduce us into thinking it will answer something for us, fulfill us.  But, it doesn't.  Its hollow and not and the thrill of getting it, lasts only a short time.   What is that void we are trying to fill ?  Could it be we have simply forgotten what things really matter in life ?  Family, friends, having faith, having hope, having more to our lives than name brands, "high end" whatever's.  Contentment comes when we figure out, that what counts are the very things that are held in our hearts and not in our hands.


my grandmother holding the neighbors cat @ 1916