I don’t care what you think. You have enough.
He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough. — Lao Tzu
Maybe this isn’t your Achilles’ heel but it sure is mine. The constant thinking that there’s more to be had. The dissatisfaction with what is. The effort to get more disguised as a true desire to contribute. Okay, maybe that last one goes a bit too far but it is the reality for some of us, if we dare to admit it.
And honestly, I get it. A lot of us put value on the symbols of success rather than providing actual value. Our priorities have been confused. We see tons of people have their fifteen minutes of success do nothing but damage the planet and society. It’s understandable though, because they’re just a symptom of a larger problem.
The problem is that people crave significance. In a body of a billion cells, they want to know that they matter. They see the love that certain people get (people who add value) and they want the glory and love. But in order to get that love, they have to provide something of value. Unfortunately, they didn’t learn or realise that.
It’s the job of our caregivers to make us know that we’re significant and important no matter what we do. But hey, they’re human. They fail at some things sometimes. For other things, they get it right.
Ultimately, it’s imperative to understand that even aside from why someone would want to be significant, one needs to understand that they may never actually achieve what they want in life if they cannot accept their current life situation.
Enough is abundance to the wise. — Euripedes
It’s a very strange, dare I say alchemical type of thing when one acknowledges that what one has and where one is, is good enough. Things change. You feel that you have enough and, oddly enough, it propels you to act from what feels like a much healthier and functional state of mind! It doesn’t cause you to rest on your laurels. Not one bit.
You may have the thought that when you decide that what you have is good enough, you’ll never ascribe for more. That is not true but it is a lie that most of us have in our heads — we think that if we declare that we have enough that we won’t get more. But as far as I’ve observed, my life doesn’t change much when I declare that I don’t have enough and I try to get more.
It’s never worked. The only thing that works is when I exhaust myself to the point where I yell uncle and then life works things out for me. Life works things out. Not me. It’s almost like I was holding myself back with all the effort I was expelling.
Granted, this kind of information is going to cause one’s mind to rebel against it. You may deny it, despite experiential knowledge that when you let go of effort and you accept what’s going on, things work out for you. I know I did.
But give it a chance. Give life a chance. Don’t wait until you effort yourself into a corner, build up gross levels of stress and then have no choice but to be okay with what is, letting life take over. Give it a try for a day. Just a test run. See how it feels.
If you’re like me, you’ll realise that this is what you should’ve been doing a long time ago.
