Enoughness

What would it be like to look around right now, and really believe that this, and you, are enough?

Thirty years ago, future senator Al Franken played a self-help guide named Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live.  His hilarious, desperate signoff was “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”

It’s a cliche, of course, and a funny bit. But the truth is, I struggle with “enoughness” every day.

What that awkward term means is the experience that how things are right now, how you are right now – whether you’re agitated or content, whatever you have or haven’t achieved, whoever you are – is enough.  Enoughness can be felt on a large scale, as you review your life and your family and your work, or on a small scale, when you’re satisfied with what you’ve got, even if it’s not all you wanted.

It also is hard as hell.

By some combination of nature and nurture, I’m what the Enneagram calls a Type 7.   I want everything: love, enlightenment, pleasure, achievement, every transcendent and immanent experience. It’s not only selfish, though.  I also want to help people, to change the world, to leave a legacy behind me.  I want to make a difference, to shift political opinions, to open possibilities – to help in some way.

Obviously, these ambitions propel me along my various careers.  Arguably, a sense of “not enough” is essential to motivation.  Otherwise, why bother?  (That’s a valid question, not a rhetorical one.)

But it can also make me deeply unhappy.  For example, when I'm criticizing myself for not doing enough, not being famous enough, not having as much power or book sales or impact as others I admire. Or when I’m captured by some old story that I learned in my childhood that I have to be smart in order to be loved.

The sense of “not enough” can also make me less effective. Desperation, envy, and unhealthy competition don’t make for better work — they make for more desperate work, which is rarely appealing.

When I’m being relatively mindful and aware, I can notice the sense of “not enough” on an almost microscopic level. When I’m getting carried away by the desire to do, feel, accomplish, experience more, and, more importantly, when I’m feeling shitty about myself for not doing those things, I can often feel myself leaning forward (often physically), yearning, wanting. With the focus of meditation, I can actually perceive this experience somatically rather than just intellectually.

And then there’s an opportunity for freedom. I can exhale a bit, settle into my present-moment experience just as it is, and feel the sense of enoughness in my body.  It’s a settling-back, a dropping of the shoulders, a relaxing.  There’s a stillness that arises, thanks, I think, to years of meditation practice.  This moment becomes radiant, beautiful… enough.

That’s true even in this particular moment, even though as I write these words, there’s a loud vacuum cleaner running in the next room and plenty of items on the to-do list.  It’s as if there’s a silence that contains this sound, a stillness that surrounds this busy-ness.  I can oscillate back and forth between leaning into the near future (wow, I should really plan for this meeting…) and settling back into the present.  This moment, this life can feel like enough, even if there is loss or pain within it.

I realize some of this may sound vague if you haven’t experienced it yourself.  But chances are, you’ve had similar moments, if not in meditation then just in regular life: moments where the striving ceases and you’re a human being rather than a human doing.

These moments can arise when the conditions are right: when the work is done (for now), when you have a moment to reflect.  But maybe the core insight of mindfulness is that you can feel enoughness under just about any conditions.  You don’t have to be on a beach vacation; once you cultivate enoughness in meditation, you can experience it in regular life.

Obviously, there are some conditions that do need to be met: physical safety, a degree of health, a degree of  financial security, and simply the ability to have a moment to pause. It’s absurd to talk about ‘enoughness’ if you’re being threatened with violence, for example. 

But if those baseline conditions are met, it’s possible to drop the (productive, helpful) desire to do and be more, and just settle into things as they are. 

Don’t worry, the ambition comes roaring right back – whether it’s ambition for some lofty, world-changing goal, or the desire for that friend to call you back.  You don’t have to worry about that.  If you’re like me, you’ll never have a shortage of  yearning. Likewise, enoughness isn’t about pretending that what’s not okay is okay, whether in our personal or political lives. It’s not that the external conditions are fine – it’s that your basic sense of enoughness is not at stake, that it can’t be stolen or colonized or gaslit away.  Alongside all that is broken, there can also be enoughness, a core groundedness that cannot be taken away from you, a happiness that does not depend on conditions.

If Stuart Smalley believed his affirmation, the transformation would be worth the cliche.