Enough

I am constantly reminded of ways in which I am not enough. Young enough, rich enough, enough enough… at least when it comes to marketing and advertising. Whatever you’re insecure about, you can be sure there’s a marketing campaign that has you in its crosshairs. Add whatever painful internal dialogue or subconscious programming you’ve got going on, and it becomes hard not to surrender.

I recently read a book called How to Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell. In the following paragraph, she describes ways in which our constant quest for progress and productivity happens to the detriment of other vital ecosystems. I found it beautifully captures our connection to nature, and how it reflects our connection to ourselves:

            “That same relationship to the richness of place lets me partake of it too, allowing me to shape-shift like the flock of birds, to flow inland and out to sea, to rise and fall, to breathe. It’s a vital reminder that as a human, I am heir to this complexity – that I was born, not engineered. That’s why, when I worry about the estuary’s diversity, I am also worrying about my own diversity – about having the best, most alive parts of myself paved over by a ruthless logic of use. When I worry about the birds, I am also worrying about watching all my possible selves go extinct. And when I worry that no one will see the value of these murky waters, it is also a worry that I will be stripped of my own unusable parts, my own mysteries, and my own depths.”

Without checking in with ourselves, it’s so easy to narrow our focus. And before long, we’ve created a highway within. Multiple concrete lanes racing back and forth, from progress to productivity. Not so bad until it starts happening at the expense of those other parts, pathways to other incredible and fulfilling places that have now become so neglected and overgrown they’re almost impossible to access, and unseen and undervalued completely paved over.

Will we ever have enough, be enough? Resist the urge to continue to build, accumulate, improve the exterior? All while other meaningful parts of ourselves that can’t be commodified in the same way wilt and die, or are otherwise destroyed in the process.

In nature I’m enough. Tangled hair, red sweaty face, a patch of sunscreen on my nose that didn’t fully get rubbed in, none of that matters. I have never once reached the peak of a mountain, surveyed the valleys below; the steep long windy trail, and thought, “If only I had a Gucci backpack, oh! And Louis Vuitton trekking poles!”

I realize partially why I’m so excited about the adventure is it provides the immersion I need to expedite growth in other areas of life, with fewer distractions and reasons to spend or obsess over making more money as a means of chasing enough. Because despite the fact that I’ve never believed the promise that I can buy my way to happiness or acceptance, there are still ways in which those messages have managed to slip past the guards.

I can’t wait to grow, explore, and be challenged. And through that process meet all the ways in which I – and we as humans – are enough.