I am on a "hard" roll...
Recently, I have come to see just how very much I do not do a good job evaluating my enough. I have written about this concept a lot but I am revisiting it in a new way lately. In everything I do or say, I see that I am constantly and habitually struggling with feeling enough, having enough, wanting enough, being enough. It is like a game time screensaver in my life. Constantly pulling at me from the sidelines, the field and the stands. I am standing in this crowded stadium that is really my life and I am getting all this input but all I have been able to see for years is the lack. I lack the proper position on the field, I lack the appropriate number of fans, I lack the appropriate equipment or athletic ability...For decades, mostly and often times completely, what I see is all that I lack...
But that is changing...why? Because it got hard enough. Hard enough for me to see where I was in my own way. Stunting my progress and growth. I grew tired of perpetually measuring and always and forever coming up short. Always grasping for one more ____ to make me finally feel ok being where I am, who I am, with the people I am with, having the amount of security I have...or not.
For me, my ego was always running the show. Distorting and co-opting my instinctual God given drives and warping them into a veritable prison of comparison. It was maddening but I couldn’t stop doing it. Until I made the very hard choice to begin practicing enough. It started with food, I would think to take one more bite, and I would think, “nope, I have had enough.” Then it moved to shoes, I would go to buy that new pair of shoes, and I would think "I have enough” (and anyone who knows me can testify that I do have enough shoes...).
Then I started thinking about attention, affection and love. Did I, could I, ever have enough of these? The answer was a resounding no...if my ego was going to run that show...but if I, could back up a bit and see myself on a more instinctual level, I saw that so long as those things were dependent upon others giving them to me...I would forever be lacking. I had to give them to myself until I was full of my own attention, affection and love. I had to pour these things into myself in great measure until I was able to answer the question for myself, and only by myself...did I, in fact, have enough from the most important relationship I will ever have in my life...the one with myself?
Enough is a varying concept and it shifts as much as there are minutes in a day. But in each one of those minutes, I can use them to reinforce that I am enough just as I am. This does not mean I am off the hook to do more work...just that the work I am doing right now, is enough.
I have to say that my life feels so very different right now...with feeling and believing that though enough is a hard concept to own, practice and maintain, that it is hard enough to live a life based on spiritual principles, it is way harder to not.
Hard enough isn’t really all that hard as it turns out. It is something I can do in each and every moment of my life. I can be right here and believe with all that I am, that I have enough of everything I need and most of what I want. There is nothing and no one outside me that is going to really make the lack go away...inside of me is the only place I can find the right stuff to see enough and really, truly, let it be...enough.
***Rachel Scott was the first victim of the Columbine shooting...she was also a writer and clearly someone who knew hard enough. Her legacy and writing is a light for us all...still.
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