Could you tell me a time you felt content?
A feeling of contentment can be as fleeting as any other emotion, yet there seems to be a certain amount of guilt attached to expressing it. I certainly don’t walk around all day, feeling content - neither do I constantly feel happy or sad or frustrated or angry. I have found, that moments of contentment can come from the simplest of things, and don’t cost much money, but they’ve stimulated my senses in such a way, that I have felt very conscience of this heightened emotion. This is probably why these moments often remain vivid in my memory for a very long time.
Swimming in lochs, rivers and the sea, then shivering myself warm with a hot drink, has always made me feel content, but these occasions have usually arisen through necessity, following a long hike or bike ride in the Highlands, when I’ve desperately needed to cool down. It’s often years later, when the memories of toiling up to a peak have faded, leaving only those of the cold water, that I’ve come to appreciate its power.
It can take a special writer and observer, like Nan Shepherd and Roger Deakin to articulate our emotions for us, and reading their books made me more aware of how and why water can have such a profound effect on us. Roger Deakin said of swimming in the wild, “you are in nature, part and parcel of it, in a far more complete and intense way than on dry land”. And Nan Shepherd wrote of Loch A’an in ‘The Living Mountain’, “Then I looked down; and at my feet there opened a gulf of brightness so profound that my mind stopped”.
I have swam on this exact spot in the Cairngorms, described by Nan Shepherd. In fact, I searched it out because of her book, and it had a similar effect on me. It was also the coldest water I’ve ever experienced. The sense of contentment I felt in the moment afterwards, drying myself in the sun, is etched on my memory. We didn’t hike up any peaks that day. The hiking was a means to an end. Exhausting ourselves completely would have only numbed our senses I think.
Moments of contentedness have become even more important over the last 12 months. I’m lucky that we live by the sea, and the daily ritual of ten minutes floating in the water, then warming up with a flask of coffee, is something to look forward to - something to focus on. When there’s no wind, when the sea is calm, when the shivering subsides and the coffee begins to warm me, from the inside out, I often feel utterly content…I have experimented with cold showers and baths, and although, the view is rather limited, they offer many of the same benefits.
