There’s something about this time of year that just makes everything seem like enough. The holidays push us closer and closer until we’re finally there, at the heart of it all. It can make the decision for us, if we let it. Because that’s what enough is. It isn’t a thing. It isn’t a place. It’s not a person. I don’t even think it’s a feeling. Enough is a decision. It’s an intellectual process that produces contentedness.
Enough is on the tips of our tongues during the holidays, even if we can’t bring ourselves to acknowledge it. Something in us is stirred to the point of actually enjoying exactly what is happening, right here, right now. But it gets stuck in our chest, or choked down in our throats. Rare are the times we let that feeling actually escape our lips.
The holiday season parallels the human condition if you zoom out far enough. Thanksgiving has become a representation of the gratitude and appreciation for whatever we have. Then we reward ourselves for that feeling by gifting presents to one another, depending on your respective holiday. A few days later, just before New Years, our cheer goggles start to blur. Boredom, dissatisfaction and guilt over indulgence start to creep in as we realize that the holidays are now passed. We can sense that drab, ordinary existence just around the corner. So we proclaim that we’ll be more and better in the coming year. Then we stuff everything back in their boxes and shove them into some dark corner to be forgotten until next year.
This isn’t meant to be all bah humbug about the holidays. In fact, the holiday season means more to me now than it ever has before. But I feel like the holidays are a physical manifestation of a narrative that is central to so many of our lives, mine included. Preoccupation, appreciation, celebration, loss of focus, forgetfulness, wanting more, rinse, repeat. You feel me?
It sounds great to say “we can appreciate what we have while also wanting more”, in fact, I wrote about it here and here. But I don’t know if this can actually happen at the same time. Because more is a fundamental aggression against what is. It’s appreciate, then more. Then appreciate. Then more. And on and on and on.
We arrive at enough today and think it will be enough tomorrow. But then we wake up with a scratchy throat and a headache, we’re grumpy cause we didn’t get enough sleep, we get stuck in traffic both ways to work, the grocery store is mobbed and it rains for 4 days in a row. Everything that was enough isn’t enough anymore.
That’s when we start to do the freak. Where’d it go? It was just here, I had it! We realize it’s lost, and the elusiveness is crushing. We feel as though we’ll never experience it again. That it’s been wiped off the face of the Earth. But our attachment whirls us into action. Certainly there has to be something we can do. So we start to play detective. Did you check between the couch cushions? What about under the bed? Maybe you left it in the car? Did someone steal it? Could you just pick up another on your way home from work? Eventually we apprehend the metaphorical person who took our beloved enoughness. We rip off the mask, Scooby-Doo style, only to come face to face with ourselves. (insert Spiderman pointing GIF)
Deciding what’s enough is incredibly humbling. It’s easy to convince ourselves that we don’t know how to answer that question. Which leads us to believe that it must be something out there that we can obtain. It can’t be that again, it just can’t! The biggest roadblock to feeling like we have enough is its simplicity.
Isn’t it interesting that the most profound lessons are always so simple? Simple, not easy. Like, love yourself and your neighbor. Appreciate what you have. Do the things that bring you joy. All the answers are inside of you (wink wink). Or even the dreaded, it was the friends we made along the way. These little tidbits are so simple that we end up mocking them as corny, cheesy and cringeworthy. So instead, we layer on with irony, personal anecdotes and educated guesses, until we end up writing 2000 words about a seemingly “simple” topic like how to have enough…. But I digress.
The expression of any feeling at all, especially the happiness of enough, is best kept to a hush. Shhhh! Keep your head down! You don’t want anyone to know you’re really happy and content with how things are. Keep it to yourself, or, if you must, scribble it in code and store it away in some dusty journal. It’s weird, but in this bizarro world, expressing enoughness is avoided like the plague. The judgement locusts are always swarming overhead.
When someone is in tune with their feelings we associate that with meaning they’re sad and being difficult. What’s hilariously sad is that the collective emotional range of humankind is so shriveled and puny that any mention of the word “feelings” sends unconscious shivers down our spines. Professional athletes give press conferences after winning major titles and describe the feeling as “indescribable or unbelievable”. IT’S JOY! PURE HAPPINESS! UTTER ELATION! YOU’RE ALLOWED TO SAY IT! I would know, my frat won Greek week my senior year of college. The optics of expression have become so warped that we get judged for saying anything meaningful at all.
Or like when someone is sitting peacefully by themselves on a park bench, not reading, not looking at their phone, not listening to music, just sitting there. We think they must be insane or a serial killer. “What a weirdo, he’s just smiling to himself, that guy must be messed up on drugs.” We act under the assumption that there’s a limited supply of enoughness in the world. As if another person’s happiness robs us of our own.
There’s a part in us that gets all squirmy when we experience others tune into the enoughness of any experience. “They’re just doing it for attention, they’re bragging, what a narcissist.” Or “why can’t I be like that? I wish I could do that kind of stuff.” There’s a reason misery loves company. It’s easier, and safer, to take things dead-ass serious all the time and complain about mundane normalness than to sit back and bask in the utter beauty and hilarity of it all.
The trap is thinking we can get rid of these wanting and jealous parts of ourselves. One way we do that is to tell ourselves to want what we already have. That only gets it half right, though. I find that lens often leads to moralistic judgements about wanting more. It says wanting more is bad. Why can’t you just appreciate what you already have dammit? The natural reaction to this line of thinking is to squeeze ourselves into the tight, restrictive box of less. Welcome to your new home! The plot is approximately 2.5 square feet, but the schools are great and you’ll love the neighbors!
Want less in terms of materialistic stuff? Yes. Want less in terms of reaching your potential? Hell no. Wanting less feels smothering to me. And it also feels like a downright lie we tell ourselves. What we really end up doing is repressing what we ask of ourselves, from others and from life overall. Doing this can very easily spill over into suppressing our needs. If we suppress these needs for long enough we eventually stop paying attention to them. (Spoiler alert, they never go away.) Then we feel bad for having them because we’re trying not to have them. So we suppress them even more. Until we wind up hating ourselves for feeling anything at all. And that’s how misery gets its company.
The allure of misery requires us to package ourselves up into less. To make ourselves smaller. Internally call that out but don’t participate, we know better, tsk tsk, not today. We need things from other people, and we need to feel certain ways about ourselves. Wanting that, and more, isn’t bad or wrong. But wanting less can lead us to believe it is.
What’s wrong is the belief that something else, outside of ourselves, will make us that person with enough. You are that person right here and right now. And so am I.
We only think we have enough when we feel in possession of good things, or favorable mind states, or it’s the holidays. Family, friends, tasty food, a warm home, a good mood. I know I’m super privileged to say this, but, the bad stuff can be enough too. The sickness, the grumpiness, the judginess, the “wishing-things-were-differentness”, yeah that stuff is included in enoughness. Feeling like you don’t have enough is enough. You have to go through that in order to get the perspective. The “not having enough” provides the background context that allows us to make the decision of having enough.
Part of the reason I think it’s so hard to appreciate everyday life is because of the fear we experience when we actually acknowledge that we do have enough. Fear and happiness together? What, dude? The fear is the holding on. It’s the not wanting to let go because you know what happens when you do. It disappears. Or at least we think it does.
Implicit in having enough is feeling like you don’t have enough. The fear of not having enough is the undercurrent that creates the catching at the back of the throat before we tell someone we love them. It’s also the jolt we feel after something tragic happens to someone we care about. It’s what wakes us up and says “hey, you better let them know while you still have the chance.” It is simultaneously a hinderance and a motivator. It is impossible to experience one without the other.
Do you hear what I’m saying? Am I coming through clearly? It’s all part of the process. But the process can only end in one place, inside your soul. It doesn’t end out there, somewhere down the road. It begins and ends in here. (I’m pointing to your chest.)
Some people don’t ever realize they’re holding onto everything they’ve ever wanted. And that’s heartbreaking. Realizing when we do feel like we have enough is awesome, we should do that more, and if it feels safe for you, maybe try expressing it to someone important. But it inevitably will slip through our fingers and tumble away, out of sight. We’ll scramble down to our hands and knees, clawing at the cold Earth, wanting anything to get it back. And then the proverbial holidays come again. We rest, we do the things that bring us joy and we are briefly able to experience it all again. We think it must be something special about the time or place. Except it’s really just a decision. Sure, the decision is easier to make in certain situations. But it’s always available to us.
Enough has to exist on this intellectual level for a while. If we consistently make the decision and believe that the search happens internally, not externally, it starts to get deeper. It gradually becomes a disposition where enough isn’t dependent on anything. Eventually we get to the point where even feeling like we don’t have enough is enough.
Thanks for reading and happy holidays!