On Dreamshaping: Enough Is Enough

Mark McNease

It’s not hard to observe the world around us and see how easy it is to live in a state of lack and fear: lack because we think that what we have is not enough, and fear of losing what we already possess! I’ve done it myself for an entire lifetime, starting as a child who needed validation and wanted more of whatever it was I had, on into adulthood where satisfaction and contentment have been fleeting and conditioned on believing, just for a few moments, that I was fulfilled. It’s the kind of completion I’ve felt after writing the last few lines of a novel, or winning some accolade that proved to me I was accepted. Those feelings of wholeness never last long, because they are not about who I truly am and want to be, but about markers of success, reassurances that I am not the failure I suspected I was.

Every now and then, most recently while standing in the shower, I have the sense that “enough is enough,” and I realize with stark clarity what is really going on: I am allowing my serenity, my perceptions of my life, to be determined and affected by the degree to which I have filled that enough cup with things, reactions, social media likes, book reviews, interest earned, smiles of others, compliments. So many things we encounter in life are filtered through our emotional selves, reflected in the dreams we live, as down payments on our well-being. But there is never a final installment, never a time when we pay the last amount and walk away whole. Being whole is like a pot of gold that exists only at the end of a rainbow in the sky. We can’t climb it, we can only look at it and imagine ourselves someday reaching the end of it. And for many of us, it is only when we take our last breath that we realize we had been whole all along. Enough had been enough, we’d just refused to embrace it.

The pursuit of enough, which is really the pursuit of more, is a road to frustration and disappointment. To search for the feeling of enough, or completion, or satiation, is to live in need. I cannot experience having enough when I always need something else to get it! To truly have enough, to stand in the shower or rest in bed or walk on a country road and know nothing else is needed to complete us, is to reach the point of surrender. To stop needing. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” To live in enough is to stop wanting, to want for nothing, to want no more than we already have. And that is truly enough.