Enough
“Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.”
“Enough” is my word of 2017. I even made a vision board. When I left my job at the start of the year, I had had enough of the stress and anxiety. And as I looked over my budget while enjoying this change of income, I decided I had enough financial resources to make things work for a while. As I developed my plans to use writing to generate income, I realized I’d spent enough time looking for things that were not writing. “Enough” is an idea that I have been working with for quite some time--how do we allow ourselves to be happy with our enough when society tells us we should want more?
This piece is not a lecture on what should be a standard for enough or an opinion on social justice. I’m not advocating that we should own only 100 things or that our society should have minimum and maximum personal incomes. I’m not criticizing those who have hundreds of shoes or thousands of twitter followers or millions of dollars.
I’m asking myself and sharing the question, “Do I have enough to be who I need to be right now?”
Like most people, I have always wanted more. And that desire for more has taken me to some good places--more education, more children, more travel, more income, more friends. But, as you can guess, it has taken me to some bad places, too--more debt, more heartache, more time away from my family, more stuff, more drama.
If I made a conscious effort to take stock of what I have before I ask for something else, would I find that I already have enough?
I have world enough.
There is a concept by a psychologist called Karl Duncker called functional fixedness. Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that works to block us from using an object in a new way to solve a problem. His famous experiment is the candle problem that challenges groups to affix a candle to a wall using a candle, matches, and a box of tacks. The challenge in solving this problem comes from how the resources are presented. The key to affixing the candle is the box which many people see only as a container to hold the tacks--not as a resource to solve the problem.
I use this concept for a workshop I developed to deliver at IKEA about management resources (it’s not sponsored by IKEA or particular to IKEA, I just like doing it at IKEA). We start the workshop discussing challenges in participants’ organizations or departments and brainstorm what they need to resolve these challenges. We come up with a list that usually revolves around the big three: money, people, and time. Then we go shopping. I ask them to think of their business problem as a decorating problem: they have to find a solution for holding a lamp and book beside a bed, and they have to do it as quickly and cheaply as possible. But secretly I tell one group to find “a bedside table” and the other group to find “a surface that can be placed beside a bed.” The first group looks for tables the second group looks for surfaces that can function as tables.
The second group always finds more, better, and cheaper solutions. They learn that if they consider a greater range of possibilities, they will find enough.
I have time.
I’m always troubled when people say, “I didn’t have enough time” to do something--reply to an email, come to a meeting, go for a walk, finish a blog, etc. The more honest answer is that I prioritized other parts of my day and did not allow time to walk or blog or meet. We have to prioritize our time and there is nothing wrong with doing this, but for me to say I “ran out of time” isn’t quite taking the responsibility of choosing how I spent it.
Regardless of who you are or where you live, you have 24 hours or 1,440 minutes or 86,400 seconds in a day. We often equate time with money, but they aren’t the same. You can’t save time and it doesn’t earn interest. Even though we say you can find it or make it or borrow it, you can’t. If you spend time well or spend it poorly, you will get more tomorrow. Until you don’t.
There are lots of books that tell you how to best spend your time: say yes to everything and challenge yourself to experience as much as you can or say no to everything and relish your time for yourself. Whatever approach you take, whether you choose to spend your time or not, it gets spent. So choose.
I have goals.
We are a determined lot. When my children were about 4 and 6, we went trick-or-treating as (homemade) matching dinosaurs. My 4-year-old announced before we left that he wanted to get a green sucker. About one-third of the way through our night, he got a green sucker. For the time it took us to canvas another block, he held the sucker in his hand. He didn’t knock on any more doors. He was done--he got his green sucker and wanted to go home and eat it.
My 6-year-old, on the other hand, was sure that one more door and one more door and just one more door would yield the elusive unidentified treat she was looking for. The fact that she already had gobs of candy, chips, pop, and even cash in her bag was irrelevant. She wanted something more.
Andrew Marvell has had “world enough and time” since 1621 to woo his coy mistress, but I have my sights set on something tamer.
My goal for this year was to believe I had enough. In a journey toward fulfillment, I have to believe that I can be fulfilled and recognize when it happens without trying to be even more fulfilled. I’ve found enough “enough.”
So I have a new word for this last part of 2017: “open.” I’m building a new vision board. Like the window in the photo from last week’s blog post, I am thrown open. Like the hands in this week’s photo, I have enough. Regardless of which glass I am holding.
