What is enough? Enough
- years
- friends
- books
- movies
- calories
- drinks
- children
How much brings satisfaction? When can we be content?
Possibly, never, for some of us. Possibly, yesterday and from now on, for some of us.
There is a book ("Of making many books, there is no end" - Ecclesiastes 12:12 ) called "Enough" by John C. Bogle, a financier. It was published in 2009, just about when the US and the world was beginning to see the full size of bad recession we are now slowly emerging from.
It is fun to think about sufficiency, adequacy, and abundance. These concepts can be related to being retired. If a person has enough money and enough time, he ought to be content, no? Ok, but can contentment be reached without money and time? Little babies seem contented, at least temporarily. They don't have money but they do have their lives ahead of them, without being able to grasp where they are in time.
A wealthy person in the last year of life has money but is out of time to live. I think such a person might well be content. For some of us, a challenge seems to be a needed ingredient for contentment. I now have 1243 posts on this blog but I feel content knowing that I have tomorrow to write again. It's like Natalie Goldberg's "Writing Down the Bones"; the post is ok when it is done but it is the leftover from the fun of seeing what I want to say and how I can say it.
The recent election is probably about having enough. Can we preserve enough Nature to continue to live? Can we find ways to have enough power for transportation, heat, and other energy uses? Can we provide enough food in enough variety to have health and pleasure? More basically, can we arrange to have enough water to live and live well?
In much of what we do in modern, capitalist society is aimed at unlimited growth: more money, more customers, more dividends. It may be better to try to fully calculate how much is enough. If we are never going to have enough, no matter what we achieve, we might as well face that. If we can figure out what would be sufficient, maybe we can reach that level and be content.
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
