What is Enough?
I walked into a large shopping mall the other week. I hadn’t been in one in well over a year. When I did go during the pandemic, it was like a ghost town – most shops closed, few people, blocked off unmoving escalators, brown boards covering many storefronts. It was eerie.
Now, it’s quite different – busy, shiny, crowded. I was immediately hit with a kind of wonder, like a child in a candy shop. Awe at the show of wealth and the variety of offerings. It was a contrast to the sad, boarded-up place it was not that long ago.
What hit me next was a surprisingly strong sense of acquisitiveness – the desire, the pull to suddenly WANT things. Here’s a beautiful candle I think I need, a gorgeous dress, new jewelry, a kitchen gadget I must have … So. Many. Things!
At first, this was delightful.
Then, I could feel the pull of desire deep in my belly – the need for these things, as if it all was a drug I had dearly missed and … wanted.
A second later, I recognized the sensation of not-enoughness; suddenly I was certain I didn’t have enough and had a deficit to fill. Even if I had enough, now I wanted more. Thinly disguised under the “I don’t have enough” is “I am not enough.”
The feeling of “I am not enough, or I am not good enough” has been a familiar one for much of my life. This excerpt from my memoir, Light in Bandaged Places, touches on not-enoughness and the feel of freedom from this constricted mind-heart space:
“After years of living a dissociated and fearful life, in a long string of relationships chosen and driven by fear, emotional protection, and the embodied belief I was not good enough, I was finally waking up to the richness of living with an open heart.”
Oddly, the mall and its splendor made me feel safe for a moment. As if in a world with all these wonderful things being bought and sold, nothing really bad could happen to me.
Once I realized the folly, the absurd delusion, of this thinking, I stopped, took a breath, and just watched the feelings, the sensations, the pull. Then awareness crept in, and I managed to disidentify from the craving and the not-enoughness. And then I was free again; I was back home to myself.
A week later, I had an occasion to go back to that same mall. I saw the same candles, dress, jewelry, and more. Again, I felt the pull, the allure, the deficiency. But I caught it right away this time, or at least faster than last time. I smiled, laughed a little, and saw it for the interesting phenomenon that it was.
It was like riding the waves of: “I want. I need. I’m not enough.” Then breathing: “I’m okay. I have enough. I am enough.” And then - freedom.
What is your experience of wanting - or the urge to grasp or cling? What frees you from it?
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