SATISFACTION AND CONTENTMENT

Les looks at the definition of contentment and suggests that you can only alter things if you want to and you want alter anything if you're already satisfied with it!

I was reading a piece in one of our national papers which interested me as only the other day a friend and I were discussing Satisfaction, or if you wish contentment. We both agreed we had little time for either. Show us someone who is contented, well we were sorry, but we wish you hadn't as that wouldn't appeal to us very much.

The extract I was reading went like this: "I think that if you are satisfied then life loses it's meaning, it's part of human nature to search for the unknown, otherwise you get stuck in the stone age". I certainly go along with that so let's take a look around us and see where we are, and what we are, or should be dissatisfied with.

Yes I agree what I am about to write about is not of world shattering importance but it is valid. We should not be satisfied with things as they are. I have in mind our Village Pump and how right our Editor is to suggest that he would like one or two younger contributors, as most contributors are like me older than we use to be. I wonder just how many young people buy or even read our Pump. I don't know but I suspect only a few which gives rise to the fact that it could be an old person's magazine.

Mr. Grumpy, writing in the August edition of the Pump, tells us of the good things in life for those living in Stoke Ferry. Well I have reservations on some of his observations which I believe are the observations of someone who was a teenager many years ago. I can't imagine any teenager living in Stoke Ferry considering for example a visit to the Post Office or the Corner Shop, or walking along the River Wissey, being the high light of their week. Our teenager would and should want something a bit more exciting than that. So satisfied teenagers in Stoke Ferry, or any other village you care to mention, no I'm sorry but I don't see this.

I wrote an article sometime ago which seem to appeal to the likes of Ron Watts, in which I suggested that I had been a teenager once years ago in Methwold and once was more than enough. I must not however give the impression that this is all about teenagers. I'm also suggesting that if people my age are satisfied with life as they see it all around them well they jolly well shouldn't be but should adopt an attitude of, "We can do better than this".

The reason I place a great deal of emphasis on our young people is obvious; they are the future. But it is only when I think about them do I feel we have let them down. I'm thinking of education, but that word does to me mean far more than leaving school with so many A levels etc. Just as important is to leave school fired with initiative, inspiration, you name it, and that is just not happening. As a result, look around you and even if we just stop at sport, yes there's more to life than that I know, but participation in so many sports in this area by our young people has declined to such an extent you wonder where it will end.

You can only alter things if you want to and you will never do that if you are satisfied with things as they are. And if you are that, well that leaves me feeling pretty dissatisfied which I think is where I started from.

Les Lawrence