The road to true contentment is a chosen journey. Our enjoyment of life expands and deepens based on being courageously open to possibility and tenaciously becoming fully human. Living mindfully in the present steadies us as we pursue true contentment and live peacefully in our everyday, engaging with love, openness, presence, and kindness.

With the story of how she arrived at her cottage home, which she calls Le Papillon (The Butterfly), Shannon Ables focuses on understanding ourselves and the world, and on living everyday with true contentment. Each person’s journey and discoveries will determine their unique destination, whether a place or something intangible.

Living a life of contentment in our everyday opens us to vast possibilities, grounding our lives, relationships, and engagement with the world in peace, starting from within and elevating the quality of our lives. We cultivate contentment by:

• Trusting our journey and engaging fully as our true selves
• Learning to understand our minds and emotions, and to interact well with others
• Letting go of expectations and remaining open to the unknown

We become able to savor daily moments — sipping a hot cuppa as the sun rises; sharing loving exchanges with a partner, child, friend, colleague, or neighbor; the evanescent gems Mother Nature bestows.

If we insist on knowing how our life journey will unfold, we disrupt the potential for magic to occur. And rather than wait for something “better”, something “more”, we invest in the present moment. We participate rather than demand, celebrate rather than control. We become love rather than wait for love.

In The Road to Le Papillon, Shannon tells intimate, never-before-shared pivotal life stories that brought her to Le Papillon. With nods to the inspiration she finds in the French and British cultures, she lays out an array of skills and ahas, many new, others shared in her first two books, Choosing the Simply Luxurious Life and Living the Simply Luxurious Life, and on her blog The Simply Luxurious Life and her podcast The Simple Sophisticate.

The book is organized by theme. Each daily entry concludes with a call to action and a petit plaisir (a simple everyday luxury). Listeners are urged to explore further with suggestions for reading or listening, or tips for the amateur gardener and chef.