Enough
Portola Valley, CA 20 September 2001
Dream fragments are all that I have this morning. Images of running. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. Oddly, though, not trapped. It was just where I was. Just there - neither able to run, nor able to hide. For some reason I feel that the dream was about authenticity. About my authentic self. And the dream is about having enough. (That sentence is a surprise.)
I have enough. Too much in fact. The cottage is bursting with stuff. Somehow I don’t think the dream was about stuff. What exactly was I running from, then? I was running from being enough. Wow, that’s a true sentence!
Enough really is enough. It is an old word that has changed very little over the eons. Before 1200 it was inoh. A bit later it became ynough. Even in the ancient Frisian enough was enoh. A good word, a steady one. Maybe there is something important about that.
How do I know enough? Why is the actual experience of enough so elusive to me? Why do I seem to know it only from the other sides – from either excess or scarcity? Maybe it is because I think of enough as a thing, as a static event, as something that I can count, or measure. Maybe I see it as some sort of goal to attain.
I don't ask if there is enough water in the ocean, or if there are enough clouds in the sky, or enough rocks on the beach. There is always a perfect amount of water in the ocean. There are just enough clouds in the sky. Never have I thought that there were too many, or too few rocks along the beach. It is always how it should be. There is always enough.
So, as I sit with this word, enough, now, for me is about looking at myself just as I would the ocean, the sky, or the beach. No different. Whole and complete, right now. When I look at the excesses in my life then, what are they teaching me? They are pointing to the moments when I feel a deep sense of scarcity. When I am attracted to excess, to the wanting more and more, there is a deeper awareness of insufficiency, a powerful urge to protect myself. If I have more of this, or of that, I will be safe, I seem to say to myself. If I just buy one more thing, have a little more and that will be enough...
I need to look directly at these pockets of insufficiency, these messages of “not enough”. I need to open myself to them, shine some light of awareness on them, and then embrace them as my own. And in this moment I sense that when I do that, when I really pay attention to those thoughts of scarcity, I will discharge some of their power, and then the urge toward “too much” might also recede for a while, and I can be just enough.
That would be a good thing.