- aseamster1996
- Sep 1
- 14 min read
“Is not dread of thirst when your well is full, the thirst that is unquenchable?” The Prophet
Mother's Day has always been a complicated holiday. I remember times not too long ago when I would spend upwards of 45 minutes scouring stacks of cards trying to find the one that would encapsulate what at best could be described as a complicated relationship.
"Thanks for always being there, Mom." You haven't always been there.
"Mom, you're the glue that holds our family together." Most times, it feels like you've torn us apart...
"I hope you know how loved you are and how lucky I feel to be your son." Often, I struggle to find love for you.
Standing in those cards, among other sons/daughters/husbands/wives coming and going after quickly making a selection, often left me treading in a well of memories; memories that lay stagnant for most days of the year. Eventually, after opening and closing all the cards, I would reluctantly choose the one that was general enough not to feel like an outright lie.
While the days of searching for the right Mother's Day card have passed, I have only recently come to fully appreciate what my mom taught me. It turns out that she taught me the exact thing that I never thought she was: enough.
More than Enough
As a young child, the idea of enough never crossed my mind. The most likely reason is that I was lucky to be raised by parents and a family where having enough was never an issue. We had enough, most of the time more than enough, of Maslow's necessities (food/clothing/shelter) of life that can be so easily taken for granted. At no other time was enough more apparent in our family than when Christmas rolled around each year.
I'm not sure where our family's fascination with Christmas began. Still, from as young as I can remember, with an abundance of pictures and VHS tapes existing to account for the years I can't, this day was always filled with an overabundance. There were many years when, once the gifts were passed out, my cousin and I, the babies of the family, could barely be seen behind our mountain of presents. Nance, my mom’s mom, was always there to capture the excitement with her camcorder, and more than once we would have to pause for the battery to be replaced in the camera. Nance was for sure the driving force behind Christmas being our family's favorite holiday, but my Mom was a close second.
As I got older, it became apparent that it wasn't enough to just have an excess of presents 1 time a year, but that other things came into play. I started to notice that my mom didn't have the same job as other parents (she was on disability for most of my life), we didn't have a house of our own (except 4-5 scattered years, we were always living with others, mostly my grandparents), and as I got older it was tough when it seemed like the only time my mom reached out was when she needed money. This is the first time I remember the gnawing sense of not having enough of something: in this case, a good enough mom.
Unfortunately, the thought that my mom wasn't good enough, because she didn't fit the definition of a "good mom" that I bought from society, stuck and became a fact for me. This limiting belief led me to dread answering the phone when her name popped up, and I would often lie about when I was coming home so I wouldn't have to deal with the atmosphere of drama that seemed to envelop her wherever she went. Inevitably, she would find out I was home and would call me in tears, pleading with me to tell her why I didn't love her.
Like standing in the stack of cards, I rarely found the right thing to say.
Can enough ever be enough?
"I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals... they are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied... not one is demented with the mania of owning things." Walt Whitman, Songs of Myself
This fear of not having enough has increasingly reared its head as I've aged and collected more stuff. Do I have enough money in the bank? Am I making a high enough salary? Do I have enough degrees? Do I have enough hobbies? Do I have enough friends? Other enoughs are a bit harder to measure. Am I spending enough time with my family? Am I doing enough in my community? Am I investing enough money now to retire comfortably in 45 years? Am I having enough of the difficult conversations with those I love to ensure we are all growing? And still, other enoughs seem too far off to even consider. Do I have enough time to live the life I want? Have I spent enough time doing the things I love?
Everywhere we turn, there seems to be another area of life that's "almost there" where we're certain that a little more will finally leave us satisfied, with enough. From an evolutionary standpoint, the intense craving for constant improvement that's embedded in our DNA has undoubtedly helped our species ascend to the top of the food chain. But just as we had to evolve and leave certain traits behind to get here, we are reaching a point where evolution to a different way of living, specifically related to how we view enough, is necessary.
The restless fact is that we know we would be happy/fulFILLED/content if we had enough. But what is enough? As Oprah recounts in the opening of Build the Life You Want, "… if there was one thing almost everyone in every audience had in common, it was the desire to be happy... Except, as I've also said before, when I asked what happiness was, people suddenly weren't sure." (Build the Life You Want p. x-xi). Maybe the missing piece in our happiness equation is reexamining how we define enough.
Have we ever been taught what enough is? If not, why aren't we taught? The cynical part of my mind says it's because consumption is what keeps the cogs of our ruthless capitalism churning, and if we all knew what enough was, the economic machine could potentially slow down. A different, more compassionate view says it's because we have all been chasing survival/security/safety (more) in the outside world for so long that it has eroded any possibility of thinking that the answer lies anywhere other than getting more outside. Or, maybe we aren't taught what enough is because it's not easily reconciled into the values or formulas that serve as the foundations of our mass education system.
While we may not know what enough is, we've seen countless examples in popular culture of how not having enough, or at least thinking we don't have enough, serves to eat us up inside. Whether we look to the suicide rates among the wealthy or the addiction rates of the famous (I only use those two examples because these groups supposedly have society's definition of enough, but it still isn't enough), it should be abundantly clear that more is not the panacea we have been sold. As David Foster Wallace recounts in his This is Water speech:
"If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth... And the so-called "real world" will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called "real world" of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of the self."
This often visceral feeling of lack and the need to get more is only intensified by our increasingly digital world, where we are inundated with social media. As Ruth Allen remarks in her book Weathering, "It's easy to feel a sense of lack in life generally, especially faced with the ironically named infinite scroll of social media content…” (Weathering, p. 191).
Instead of being taught to be content with what we have, our sense of lack leaves us craving more and more. This destructive feedback loop amidst the search for enough is hauntingly shown in the recent documentary covering Avicii's life titled "I'm Tim."
SOS
"Can you hear me? S.O.S. Help me put my mind to rest."
We have seen in ourselves and those around us how our discontentment can wreak havoc on our lives as it leaves us with feelings we often seek to cover through distraction. These distractions, if we aren't careful, can quickly morph into cycles of addiction (isn’t an addiction in itself a lack of knowing what enough is). The gnawing sense of not having enough and not being enough is enough to drive anyone mad. As Joe Dispenza explains regarding addiction in his book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, "Over time, we become addicted to something in order to ease the pain or anxiety or depression we live with on a daily basis. Is this wrong? Not really. Most people do these things because they just don't know how to change from the inside. They are only following the innate drive to get relief from their feelings, and unconsciously they think their salvation comes from the outside world. It has never been explained to them that using the outer world to change the inner world makes things worse... it only widens the gap." (Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself p. 162).
We unfortunately get a perfect view of this gap widening when we watch the documentary about Avicii's life. From an early age, Tim Bergling was touted as someone who would revolutionize the industry with his innate creativity and love for music. His stardom from a young age led him to be surrounded by many people concerned with contracts and how to profit from his talent, which at times, as shown in the film, left Avicii facing the battle between producing the art he loved or producing a product that would sell to the masses. It was the latter that usually won out, and there was an insatiable need from fans and agents for an ever-increasing amount of creative energy. Tim eventually gave too much of himself and found himself in a struggle with enough that presented itself in the form of addiction.
In what I would consider the climax of the documentary, after his family convinces him to go for an intervention for drug addiction, Tim gives a poignant first-hand recount of how he ended up where he did:
"I went to psychiatrists, I went to doctors. I tried so many different diets. I tried to start working out, I changed the way I toured. "Maybe it's too many decisions a day, maybe that's the problem?" Fucking all kinds of stupid shit that was never the problem. Fuck, it's hard, really hard. I don't really know. I just know that it got to a point where I didn't like it anymore. This isn't me. It's just trying to be something that isn't me. But my dream would be to be completely, completely at ease and completely happy with what I've got already and not really have any aspirations to do a billion other things. Fuck, I just want to be free from all the ideas of a life. The thing that kept me from living life has been that exact thing: Having an idea of what life should be and what should make me happy. You know, making a bigger song will make me happier or this and this... nothing has turned out to be true. But I want to learn how to be content. That would be life for me. Being content."
Avicii had the money, acquaintances, personal success, professional success, a supportive family, the list goes on and on. He had everything that society tells us we must have in order to be content. He had it all, and it still wasn't enough.
I heard once that all of the things that society tells us we need to "get there" and to "be content" are all a bunch of zeros - they have 0 inherent value within themselves. The difference comes when we realize that we've had what we've been searching for all along: life, the ability to feel. This realization serves as the 1 that goes in front of all of the 0s we have collected and gives them their unlimited value. Without that realization, we are standing holding a bunch of 0s and wasting our lives collecting more.
The good news? We already have the missing piece we have been killing ourselves looking for.
You Are the Missing Piece
"The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at each other's welcome... -Love After Love
It seems we are at a point in our evolution where we must grapple not with how we look for enough, but where we look for enough. Up to this point, enough has been sold exclusively as an outside commodity. But what if enough is inherent in each of us? What if we've had enough this whole time and have just been looking in the wrong place for it?
This idea is recounted perfectly in the often-quoted story of the Musk Deer. The deer catches a scent of something one morning early in its life and becomes obsessed with finding it. Convinced that finding this scent will fulfill its life mission, it spends each day frantically searching the valleys, mountaintops, and every corner in between, seeming to always be close but never quite reaching it. Exhausted from the search, it eventually finds itself on its deathbed. Resting for the first time, the deer pauses and, in the stillness, notices that somehow the scent remains beyond the valleys and mountains and corners. The scent it was chasing outside was actually coming from its own pores. It had what it was searching for.
Pádraig Ó Tuama sums this up beautifully by saying, "All along an actual savings call was coming from now, from here, from this, from look, from everything all around, from see, from taste, from feel..." (In The Shelter p. 267). It's as if, because feeling and now and sensations have been given to us for free, we fail to acknowledge that they could be where the true value of life is discovered.
Could enough be picking up warm dog poop on a cold morning? Could enough be seeing the sunset as you walk with a family member on a coastal summer night? Could enough be the fact that our heart is beating and blood is flowing and a billion other psychologically magical processes are occurring within us? Could enough be that the Earth is spinning on its axis and we don't have to do anything to make that happen? Could enough be watching a squirrel figure out how to get food from a bird feeder? Could enough be calling someone with not much to say, just to hear their voice? Could enough be doing completely whatever it is we are doing?
Joseph Campbell may have put it best when he said, "People aren't searching for the meaning of life as much as they are searching for what it means to feel alive." Could it be that our feeling alive is precisely what is veiled in our incessant quests to find the outside thing that will finally allow us to sit back and say we've made it?
Does this mean that our external quests will end once we realize that we already have enough, no matter what is happening outside? Absolutely not. But what will end is the associated anxiety, stress, and neurosis we are living in our chasing culture, where we think just one more thing outside will satisfy us.
The Musk Deer is telling us to stop running around searching. Tim is telling us that we are enough as we are without needing to chase more. Life is telling us to stop frantically chasing. Experience is telling us that enough is enough.
Enough is Enough
There have only been a few times in my life when I’ve been aware in the moment of the feeling of emptiness while being surrounded by abundance. My ex's best friend's parents are extremely generous, and because they have done well, they would take a Labor Day weekend trip to Nantucket each year. We were fortunate a few years back to make the shortlist of those invited. While not quite Martha's Vineyard, ACK contains all the fixings of unhampered pleasure and excess that should yield contentment. On top of the invite, the entire trip was free. My friend's parents covered everything: the house, meals, entertainment, drinks, excursions, literally everything.
Still, I distinctly remember feeling, with a stuffed belly and a slightly tipsy mind, that it really didn't feel like much. Was it because I felt like I didn't deserve it? Was it because, like any external pleasure, there is a diminishing margin of return? Or was it because I still didn't know what enough was and how to fully enjoy "it”?
I was given a second chance at learning what enough was as we were invited back for a 2nd time on Labor Day in 2023. This time, the idea of what enough is would stick for good, but not for any reason I could imagine.
We had just placed our first round of mudslide orders at the Gazebo, the one with dollar bills stuck to the ceiling, when my phone rang. "Dad's Mobile" flashes on the screen. I'm a split second from silencing it and diving into the drink, but I decide to answer.
There is a forced silence on the other end. "Can you talk?" my dad eventually asks me.
I had worked with my mind enough by now to not let it snowball into worst-case scenarios, but the tone of his voice caused alarm bells to sound in my head. I whispered to my friends that I would be back in a second and walked down the steps of the Gazebo to head towards the cobbled drive not too far away to hear him better.
"Buddy, I don't know how to tell you this… But they found your mom dead this morning."
…
…
…
Many things flashed through my mind at this moment. The most prominent image was that of my then 10-year-old brother Gavin. Our Mom was his entire world.
No more hugs.
No more kisses.
No more innocent moments of laughter like this:
What could it possibly feel like for your world to explode and implode at the same time?
I had a sliver of an idea about what this felt like because of what happened to me 6 months prior. After working extensively with a life coach, it finally hit me that my view of my mom as not enough was just that, my view. It had absolutely nothing to do with her. What really struck me was the thought that she literally created me and grew me for 9 months in her belly, and then kept me alive as a kid to be alive to experience anything. And guess what, for 26 1/2 years that wasn't enough. What the fuck was I thinking to believe and treat her like she wasn't enough? Because she didn't own a house? Because she asked for money? Because she was on disability? My view of her had been so warped by my unconscious worship of society’s definition of enough that I kept myself from experiencing love with the one person who made the experience of love possible.
I had enough all along and had completely missed it.
I hung up with my dad with my head swirling. The swirling would last for weeks as we all coped with the immediacy and finality of enough. For most, the issue was not enough time. For me, it was finally understanding that she taught me the one thing that is next to impossible to teach, what enough is.
Here I was for 26 ½ years wanting her to give me stuff, give and provide me the things that society told me I would need to be happy, and all along she was teaching me, through the way that only a mother can, what enough was. Was it an easy learning to grasp? No. But are any of the big learnings in this life?
More than anything, I just wanted to apologize to her. For the first time, the forgiveness that I sought from her was suddenly reversed, and I realized I was the one who needed to ask her for forgiveness. But that opportunity had slipped away with her final breath.
I ended my Mom's eulogy with these words from Gibran:
“When you part from your friend, you grieve not; for that which you love most in her may be clearer in her absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.”
If I had the chance to give my mom another Mother's Day card, from this new perspective she has trusted me with, I wouldn't spend time in a card shop. I would simply write:
Thanks for being enough even when I couldn't see it. I love you.
