A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough (15 page)

I went upstairs, closed my door, and all I remember is playing music on my guitar, listening for the old, visceral comfort I used to find in music when I was his age.

I had to listen, deep and long, trusting that whatever angels or spirits or grace had lifted me up and held me in times of feeling lost or frightened or confused would also be there for him to call on, if and when he decided he needed them.

He did fail. He did drop out. Then, a few months later, he got his GED and began taking classes at the local community college. Now, at nineteen, he works with orphans in India, is studying Hindi with a professor from Banaras Hindu University, and is volunteering with an organization working to help clean up the Ganges River.

What happened? I saw clearly that no matter how much I tried to do the “right” thing—make him go to school, make him do his homework, make him get good grades, make him graduate—that I could still never, ever guarantee that he would get excited about school, do well, go to a good college, have a great career, or find his passion. This he needed to find for himself. Which, in the end, he did.

How Many Eggs Can You Hold?

W
hen I was a hospice chaplain, I was a privileged witness to the tender concerns of those keenly aware of their mortality. The things they would wonder about were often quite simple: Have I loved well? Have I lived deeply and fully? Did I waste precious time distracted by too many unimportant things? Did I attend carefully to my loved ones, my work, my community? Have I left a legacy of kindness? Has my life in some way brought benefit to others?

Living and loving well require us to make difficult choices each day of our lives. The heart-opening unconditional love we seek requires our heart’s best time and attention. Love, friendship, children, kindness, good and fruitful work—all these things need time, accompanied by our full, unhurried, undistracted attention. Because the sheer number of hours in a day is limited, we must choose where, when, and with whom we will share whatever brief time and attention we have.

Here is where most of us fall apart. We have convinced ourselves that we can keep taking on more and more, just this one more thing, one more task, relationship, commitment. But at the end of the day, nothing ever receives the benefit of our best love, care, or attention. Everything ends up being somehow
managed, pasted together, a quick fix, a check-in, something checked off our ever-expanding, impossibly too long list.

As we listen for the shape of a life of enough, one question in particular seems to strike at the core of this dilemma facing us all. The question is this: How many eggs can we hold?

When we are children, we begin to find and collect “eggs”—people, ideas, dreams—that we like to hold in our hands. As our hands naturally grow larger over time, we are able to hold more eggs. Youth is a time of curiosity, gathering up and collecting more. The eggs slowly fill our hands. The more we grow, the more eggs we can hold without fear of dropping them.

But at a certain point we stop growing, and our capacity to safely hold on to any more eggs stops growing with us. While different people have different-sized hands, and some can hold more or less than others, each of us has our own finite limit, beyond which, if we take on even just one more, things will start to fall and whatever precious things we are carrying will invariably begin to break.

Once we have reached this moment of fullness, of satiation—of enough—we can only pick up a new egg if we carefully take at least one from the existing pile in our hands and gently put it down. We must let something go. This is no judgment about our ability, skillfulness, or power. It is simply the inevitable physics of a human life.

Pressed by the cultural imperative to produce, accomplish, take on more and more, few of us ever feel willing or able to admit to this fundamental human limitation. Any confession of our personal inability to sustain unimpeded growth feels like a shameful inadequacy, an essential flaw, a failure to thrive.
Consequently too many precious people and relationships get unintentionally dropped, and some are broken. At worst, we are forced to drop everything all at once and then try to clean up the terrible mess we created by adding those few extra eggs, at the last minute, in a hurry, without thinking.

Like the number of eggs we can hold, we can only deeply, truly offer our best love and care to a finite number of people, relationships, or goals in one human life. Everything we do, everyone we meet, involves real, living people. And all living things need a certain amount of authentic care and attention if they are, indeed, to thrive. How much of our undistracted time and care can we honestly promise each and every person, relationship, responsibility we invite into our already overcrowded lives—and just as honestly promise we will be able to show up, each and every time, and bring our full, complete presence and attention?

Some argue that if love is limitless, unconditional, and spreads exponentially into the world when offered, how can I possibly claim that our capacity to love well is limited? I have, to be sure, been blessed with the loving company of countless generous souls, beautiful people who have cared well and deeply for me and many others. It is also true that some people have a tremendous capacity to offer their time, attention, care, and hospitality freely and authentically to many in need who cross their path.

Still, if we think of those who we use as models of loving care—Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, St. Francis, Mother Teresa—how many people did they actually spend the bulk of their days with? Thousands? Millions? Likely it was a dozen or more at most who received their unhurried, undistracted
attention or company. In reality the number of people may have been far smaller. Here’s the thing: Love is unconditional and limitless; honest, intimate, loving relationships with real people are not.

Because every authentic relationship requires time and care, all our children, our friendships, our spouse or partner, our colleagues, all need our focused, unhurried time. The more we grasp or hold on to, the more we try and make our heart’s work more “efficient.” Eventually our relationships with everyone and everything in our lives become so managed, hurried, and superficial, they provide little real nourishment. At a certain point, people begin to fall away, and things we cherish—like trust, and care, and respect, and countless other beautiful people and things and dreams—will break or shatter as they fall, cascading one after another from our overflowing grasp.

Sadly, most of us discover enough by racing past it. We eat more than we can and then feel queasy and uncomfortable. We push ourselves more than our bodies can handle, and then we get sick. We take on more work, projects, events, relationships, and then we feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and discouraged. How much of our life, our day, is filled with things we picked up and brought home that we did not seek, want, or need? How many of these have become nagging problems, something else demanding our attention, not bringing us any happiness, just one more thing to deal with?

It was, in fact, Mother Teresa who said, “We can do no great things, only small things, with great love.” Martin Luther King concurred: “A journey is made of small steps. Don’t focus on a far-off destination if you’re not clear how to get there. Build a foundation that is solid for you. We get to new places
one step at a time. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

Like a tide it comes in,
Wave after wave of foliage and fruit,
The nurtured and the wild,
Out of the light to this shore.
In its extravagance we shape
The strenuous outline of enough
.

WENDELL BERRY

Tea Story

A
university professor took a long pilgrimage to visit a very wise and important Zen master. The professor, who had spent a good deal of his professional life studying the history and precepts of Buddhism, had gone all that way in hopes of receiving some kind of personal teaching from the master.

The master welcomed him in and invited him to sit down and have tea. The master began to pour tea into the visitor’s cup. As he poured, the professor noticed the cup was nearly full. The master just kept on pouring more and more tea into the already full cup.

The professor watched the obviously overflowing cup until he would no longer restrain himself. “Master,” he exclaimed, “the cup is overfull. No more will go in!”

The master responded: “Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

When Small Is Beautiful

I
recently met with a good friend who runs a large community foundation. I wanted his thoughts on a paper I was writing about microgranting in local communities. It was his experience that many large foundations, even when they offer substantial grants to expand small, very well-meaning projects at first grow and prosper, and then somehow eventually fail, in spite of good work by skilled people with the best intentions.

He asked me about Bread for the Journey, a small local charity I had helped start twenty years ago, now operating in chapters across the country. “When you help so many local people get started from the ground up, aren’t you just setting up most of them for failure? Can you even name five projects you helped get started that are still thriving after five years?” I thought for a moment, then mentioned two projects—a community weaving cooperative that had spread to five different communities, and the Española Valley Crisis Center, which I describe in the
next chapter
. Then I named a few more, which caused me to recall a few more, and after the first dozen or so that tumbled from my memory, we both saw I could keep going for quite a while, and he conceded I had a point.

Then I asked, “These well-intentioned programs that you support—how do they typically fail?” He told me about a
fledgling community center that had begun as a small Quonset hut. The foundation supported an expansion to include a new building, more services for teens, an art program, an after-school program, a GED program—all things that would greatly benefit any struggling community. They hired more staff, offered programs to local schools, and began developing relationships with local businesses.

“It was a great project,” he said.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“It was simply underfunded. As their program grew, they needed more funding to do their work, and in an impoverished community it was hard to raise all the funds they needed to keep growing. Finally it just collapsed for lack of money.” He then shared other scenarios where, at some point, the growth of some well-meaning group outran their capacity to sustain it. “They were great projects,” he said sadly, “but they failed because in the end, they were underfunded.”

I offered an alternate explanation. “What if the problem was not that the projects were ‘underfunded,’ but rather that they were ‘overdreamed’?” I asked. He asked what I meant. “What if when they started, they grew organically and to scale because their funding, experience, and wisdom all grew together, at the same rate. But at some point their essential mission changed; almost every nonprofit I have ever worked with reaches this choice point:
If we can do this much so well, wouldn’t it be better if we could do more, and help more people?
What if—seduced by our American belief that the best is always the one that does the most—they began to overdream, to overreach their honest capacity? What if, out of sheer, good-hearted desire to do as much as possible, they took on more than they
could honorably hold as well as what they had held before? Like climbing too far out on a branch that will not hold our weight, perhaps it simply collapses?”

The issue of the longevity, vitality, and sustainability of our life and work is often determined by our concept of
scale
. We are easily trapped by the presumption that “bigger is better.” If we create something that serves
x
people well, and runs effectively and easily, our next thought is, “If we can do this much with what we have, imagine how much more we could do if we only had twice as much, three times as much, ten times as much?” While this begins with some noble intention, even the best of intentions can be corrupted by a subtle undercurrent of pride, greed, and deep confusion about what, in any project, in any community, is “enough.” Even when our greed is not so much for ourselves—even when driven by a greed to do more good—it can still undo us in the end.

Bread for the Journey has, from the beginning, been committed to the sustainability of small things. Often an inspiration strikes one local person, who tells another, who both come to us, who then galvanize enthusiastic volunteers, donors, and collaborators. Each contributes what they know, their wisdom of the community, their experience with their neighbors, and their working knowledge of how things work on the ground. We find that these small, enthusiastic groups of volunteers often give birth to projects that last a very long time. In fact, the large majority of projects we have funded are still in operation—after five, ten, even twenty years.

Quiet Grace and Hidden Wholeness

B
read for the Journey is a small, grassroots charity, started by a few close friends and I over twenty years ago, which supports the dreams of local people to make their community a better place to live.

Many years ago we received a call from Henrietta Calderon. She was concerned there was no shelter for women who were victims of domestic violence anywhere in New Mexico north of Santa Fe. This meant that any woman who needed shelter was forced to uproot her children from their friends, school, and community; drive up to 100 miles to get to Santa Fe; and often would get little outside support from their local community when they would return home.

We asked Henrietta how we could help. She had contacted the city of Española—the most geographically central community in the north—and brokered a deal to rent a city-owned foreclosure home for only $300 a month and use it for the shelter. Henrietta would volunteer full-time as the director, and would live at the shelter so she could help in any and all emergencies. When we asked about her total budget, she said the rent—$3,600 for the year—was their only expense. Henrietta’s only living expenses consisted, she confessed, of her monthly welfare check.