So confession: I have a slight addiction to pinterest.  I’m not so much into the crafts and workouts and home decorating stuff that fills up most of my feed – if you’re one of my friends whose home is a beautiful cacophony of elegance and style, kudos to you.  I like looking at your pins, but it’s not really why I opened pinterest.

My two favorite categories are quotes and humor, and depending on my mood, I almost always open one of those.  Occasionally I stray into the paleo recipe section, but not as often these days.  I’m usually surfing around during the workday while I’m  waiting for GoToMeeting to start (which is, sadly, a large part of my life) or for that one last person to join a call before a meeting gets going.  Pinterest is perfect for those kinds of pockets of time because you can look at one thing and be done, or you can kill 5 minutes pretty easily.

Yesterday I was looking at random quotes, and I saw a pin that said “Decide to be Content.”  I think I physically recoiled when I saw it.  I don’t usually have a strong negative reaction to pins — I either think it’s funny, interesting, or dismiss it as drivel and skim passed it pretty quickly.   This one, however, actually made me kind of mad.  Decide to be content?  Seriously?

What kind of genius was ever extracted from someone’s soul while they were sitting around feeling content?  Which goal was reached or lesson was learned?  And further, if you’re “deciding” to be content rather than recognizing that you are content, you’re purposely quelling a voice inside you that is driving you to something different.  Something new.  Something energizing or scary.

Maybe the person who wrote that pin was really trying to say: Be at peace with yourself.   That’s a pin I could have gotten behind.  Understand who you are and what you need to overcome to be a better version of you, but do it with a gentle hand and a healthy dose of self-love.  God made me who I am, and these are my battles to fight while I’m here.  So I will continue to fight the battles, but not myself.   That, I get.

But contentment just sounds so stagnant.  So accepting of the status quo.  I think about the people in my life and some of the decisions they’ve made based on discontent that were so amazing.  A decision to home-school a child.  A decision to start a new project or business.  A journey to improve health.  All of those things were based on recognizing that there are some things we should not accept, not be content with.  We should be in a constant state of evaluation and movement.

I do think we should appreciate moments of contentment — of satisfaction.  Recognition for something achieved or acknowledgement of something loved.   I feel moments of true contentment all the time, like standing in my kitchen on a sunny evening cooking dinner with a glass of wine while David and the girls are laughing together in the other room.  It’s a perfect snapshot of contentment.   My soul is at peace.

But a blanket call to action of “Decide to be Content” just feels wrong to me.  The world needs a healthy dose of discontent in order to grow. And so I will rebut the pin I saw yesterday with the Dos Equis slogan: Stay Thirsty, my friends.  Thirsty for ways to make the world a better or more interesting place. Thirsty for a challenge. Thirsty for growth.  Thirsty with unquenchable curiosity for the “what if.”

You never know where it will lead you.  But it might just be amazing.