What Is the Difference Between "Contentment" and "Settling"?

Happy new year, everybody!

Poet Molly Fisk suggests that instead of making new year's resolutions, we choose a word to reflect on throughout the year - or rather, that we allow a word to choose us. I've been doing this for four years now. For 2023: "closure." For 2024: "trust." For 2025, "openness." And now for 2026 - ta-dah! - "contentment." As the poet she is, Molly urges us to research our word - its etymology, its allusions, its literary richness.

For "contentment," I have a problem. The noun "contentment" is defined as "peaceful satisfaction." But the verb "content" has less pleasing associations. As a transitive verb, "content" means, according to Merriam Webster, "to appease the desires of" and "to limit (oneself) in requirements, desires, or actions." That is to say, to content ourselves with less than we had hoped to get.

There is something undeniably SMALL about contentment. When we talk about contentment, we are not talking about how we feel after a successful ascent on Mount Everest or winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. We are talking about sitting by a fire cozily reading a good book. We are talking about looking at gently falling snow outside a cottage window. And this IS the kind of contentment I want for myself in the new year, contentment in life's little things. 

So my question for myself - and for anyone else who wants to ponder it - is: when is this kind of smallness TOO small? We don't want to be the fisherman's wife asking the wish-granting flounder for more, more, MORE. But we don't want to settle for second-best, either. I love these lines by Pulitzer-prize winning poet Kay Ryan:

However carved up/ or pared down we get/ we keep on making/ the best of it as though/ it doesn't matter that/ our acre's down to/ a square foot. As/ though our garden/ could be one bean/ and we'd rejoice if/ it flourishes, as/ though one bean/ could nourish us. 

So, again, when is less too little? When is small too shriveled and shrunken?

Maybe it has to do with how much we are truly contented - peacefully satisfied - with what we have, as opposed to forcing ourselves to put on a smiley face in response to undeniable disappointment. And maybe it has to do with the size of our expectations - reasonable or ridiculous?

I love my small, somewhat shabby rental cottage and wouldn't trade it for a palace. (Note: this is a real photo! Not photo-shopped! Not AI-generated!)

I love my small, definitely shabby 14-year-old Honda Fit that I bought used from Boulder CarShare and still has their logo visible through its cheery turquoise paint. I would drive the same car if I won the lottery tomorrow. 

It's in regard to my writing career that I'm struggling a bit. I wrote two books last year; I'm awaiting word from the publishing gods on the fate of both of them. Hopes are dimming for the first one; I should hear about the other one very soon, and I want good news about it VERY MUCH. But publishing is getting more and more competitive. There are more and more new writers out there writing wonderful books. It may be that the book I have coming out in March, Calliope Callisto Clark and the Search for Wisdom, will be my last published book.

It's already gotten some nice accolades: it's a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection and received a glowing, starred review from often-curmudgeonly Kirkus. But maybe that's all it's going to get. And I so want this book, which may be my last book, to be THE ONE the world fawns over, the one that will secure my place in the pantheon of children's literature creators, the one that will make me immortal. Is that too much to ask?

Well, of course it is! If I think it's not enough that I've had a wonderful 40-year-long career, with this my 64th published book, AND get to live in a cottage I love with a man I love, with quiet peaceful happiness just about every single day, then the greedy fisherman's wife has nothing on me! So, yes, I am vowing to center my life in the year 2026 on contentment. I don't have just one bean to nourish me. I have whole steaming tureens overflowing with beans! 

My goal for 2026 is to remember this with a heart full of gratitude.