A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough (5 page)

A Thread of Truth

When I was with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, I worked with a team studying the dynamics and responses to busing and school desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky. We interviewed everyone who had anything to do with the experience
.

On the day I went to interview individual students—both African American and white—who were attending a previously all-white high school, the teacher who was coordinating my time sent me, to my surprise, not individuals one at a time, but a group of twelve white students. I had already prepared my questions, but instead I asked them about their experience in the past and what had changed with busing and desegregation. The answers were very clear: Everything before was fine; now it was awful. The description of the African American students was horrific—dumb, smelly, rude, uneducated, the n-word, as bad as you could possibly imagine. One sophomore girl was particularly caustic in her hateful, racist comments and seemed to enjoy using every moment of her time to set the record straight about these terrible “lowlifes.”

The mood in the room had reached a near-fever pitch, when a knock on the door was followed by my next group to be interviewed—twelve African American students. The hush in the room was instant and palpable. The white students all got
up to leave; I said, “No, you can stay, please sit down,” which they did. I then proceeded to ask the newly arrived students the exact same questions I had asked the white students
.

The stark reality of the answers—we had no books last year, our school was filled with litter and everything was broken, our teachers were not like the teachers here, the cafeteria was awful—corroborated the answers of the white students. Except that instead of racial stereotypes, here was the very tender, human side of these new, grateful students
.

I realized there was a stifled noise to my left. I looked over and saw the sophomore girl—the same one who had been so filled with hate—crying, tears streaming down her cheeks. She stood up and said there was something she needed to say. Between her deep sobs, she told the African American students what she had just been saying about them—everything, word for word. Everyone in the room started to engage in the conversation, with much of the support given to the sophomore girl coming from the African American students
.

The discussion turned rigorously honest, courageous, and real, and it forever changed the hearts of each one of us. It was enough to meet each other and tell the truth, to hear each others’ stories, enough to learn how profoundly we are all so undeniably connected. When the teacher came to reclaim her students, they sent her away, so they could continue talking until they felt they had reached a point where they were done, for now. When they walked out to face the rest of their world, they walked out together
.

Reese Fullerton

Enough Is a Verb

T
he next right thing, the moment of enough, is always and forever changing, just as we are being changed. The most basic level of our physical and emotional development ensures that who we are, what we need, and what we can or cannot do about it is in perpetual flux. We never wake up to precisely the same life twice.

If we wake up assuming we are basically the same person, with the same achings of heart, yearnings of soul, and needs of the body, we will gradually drift further from the truth of who we have become in this moment. If we are reluctant to update our position, we will live our days presuming that wherever we set our course when we began, however long ago, obviously describes precisely where we should be by now.

But our life pilgrimage is always changing, and what is enough for today has been seeded by hundreds of choice points, each responding to subtle but undeniable shifts in our heart’s desire, our ability to see clearly, and to tell the truth about what we see.

Various branches of scientific inquiry enthusiastically affirm what the Buddha described as the Law of Impermanence. The fact that all creation is subject to endless change seems inevitably
true. From the tiniest subatomic particle to the cells in our bodies, from civilizations to the sun, moon, stars, and galaxies, nothing remains as it is, everything is subject to the immutable law of impermanence. So whenever we make a plan and stick to it, at some point we must choose: Either we refuse to acknowledge or accept that radical change has been happening all along, requiring that we adapt to the next right thing, and make changes to our plan, or we keep trying to live in a world that no longer exists.

Enough is never a static measurement, it is not a guaranteed state or quantity of anything. Our experience of enough is both current and relational. It is about being engaged in a passionate conversation between who we are and what the world has today suddenly become.

If we do not remain in a current relationship with the world around us, we risk maintaining a course that refuses to be altered or informed in any way by new information or changing conditions. Like a bulldozer paving a straight path through the lush convolutions of the rain forest, we miss endless opportunities for learning, for surprise, for awe, for wonder, and for the exhilaration of discovery.

Simply put, we play out the curse of a decided life.

We will live with choices made in a different time, when we were a different person. How many of us at forty are still pursuing the dream we built when we were twenty-five? How many of us at sixty are striving to complete the goals of our forty-year-old predecessor? If we do not allow what we know about ourselves and the world to change, our world will feel more fragile and empty, we will get smaller and more protective
of our life as we know it, we will become increasingly isolated, more wary of any sense of growth or change, reaping only the scarcity of a shrinking life.

Enough is born in relationship. Vital relationships are, by nature, erotic. They are sensual, in that they are informed by all our senses, our openness to see, taste, touch, smell everything with a willingness to be taken, to be surprised, swept off our feet. We participate in an erotic relationship whenever we engage the world with full sensual awareness—for ex ample, whenever we bite into an apple. By itself, an apple has no taste, no piquant flavor of late summer. Our mouth, lips, and tongue, our taste buds by themselves have no taste of apple. The magnificent flavor of a crisp apple freshly picked by hand comes alive the instant the apple enters our mouth. One small bite, and a sudden eruption of juices, tongue, saliva, taste buds, and apple flesh create the necessary erotic intercourse that sets free the awesome taste, the flavorful wonder of apple.

Just as we meet our choice points as uneaten fruit, it is only in our tasting fully the texture, fragrance, sense of how we are, who we are, in this moment, everything we could not possibly ever know until now—not yesterday, not tomorrow, not next year, but only in this moment—that we can fully know what is true, beautiful, necessary, right.

This is an erotic life. It is a dangerous life, because it refuses to be predicted, planned, controlled, evaluated. It is radical, in stark opposition to the way the culture presumes we absolutely must live in this world. It is dangerous, because we must finally abandon the comforting illusion that we can in any way control the outcome.

How we choose this moment will change the way we live. This smallest of things, this mustard seed, this single pearl of great price, will change our life, our relationships, our happiness, our sense of whether we feel filled or emptied. It will, in the end, change everything. When we can discern what is most true, inspired by our deepest love for all involved, our decisions are likely to land us in moment after moment of easy sufficiency.

How do we know if we are choosing well or poorly? Our problem begins when we believe that we can know, with any reliable accuracy, whatever is fully and completely true about any given moment, situation, or circumstance. We then feel pressured to predict or control each and every possible consequence arising from this choice. But moving clearly into the next right thing does not necessarily bend to such logic. How can we, after all,
know
that a situation should work out this way or that way? Can we really
know
that we should have that promotion? Perhaps life has another, grander, more nourishing plan in mind. Can we really
know
that our child should attend this school over that one? Perhaps there are unknown variables that will reveal themselves later.

In opening ourselves to the unknown, our choices may not find an authority within logic, reason, and accumulated evidence but rather in more subtle nuances of intuition, feeling, and sense. So rather than presenting themselves with bold, decided confidence, bolstered by facts and figures, our choices reveal with tender humility, in a soft, open palm. We may not know if we are choosing “correctly,” but we can begin to trust from where the choice arose. We can begin to trust
the expression of that living wholeness. And in that trusting, we can relax the frantic, frenzied striving for more, settling into the fullness and sufficiency of just this next right thing.

Enough, then, is a verb, a conversation, a fugue, a collaboration. It is not a static state, something achieved or accomplished. It is relational, by nature unpredictable, punctuated by wonder, surprise, and awe. It may feel dangerous and inefficient. It demands we stay awake, pay attention to what is true in this moment, in our hearts, and make our choices always and only from that place. Then whatever we decide brings a sense of rightness and sufficiency, arriving with an exhale, a letting go, a sense that this, here, for now, is enough.

Seasons

I
stroll the narrow streets of my neighborhood in Santa Fe, a jumble of mostly small, old adobe houses, many with quietly magnificent gardens that occupy whatever space, large or small, is available to them.

As we approach the summer solstice, the lingering light illuminates the blossoming of things that have, each in their own way, found their particular moment to gently, perfectly open to sun and sky, every bloom in its season.

This cactus is already offering delicate yellow paper cups with brown bottoms, while another species awaits its now-dormant calling, only flowering later in the season.

The roses bloom riotously everywhere in town, color and fragrance and petals filling the atmosphere with their abundant readiness. The hollyhocks, only slightly behind, explode upward from the soil to the top of the stalk, impossibly pink, yellow, deep blood red blossoms arriving pair by pair along each side.

How do they know their particular moment? Each waits, quiet, still, dormant, apparently dead through winter’s cold, icy frosting. Yet each awaits its turn, one by one, for the just right alchemical light, temperature, angle of Sun and Earth, month, day, to hear its singular call, the one and only
yes
among a
thousand different million yeses that orchestrate life on Earth. What one particular yes spoken by God gives birth to this blossom, this day, this summer evening?

How do we know the timing of anything? How do we distinguish the time of yes from the time of no? How do we hear the knowing of maybe, not yet, a little while, or simply let it be? A missed moment, a child taken from the womb too soon, a truth spoken too late, and all is lost. Yet note the precisely perfect, absolutely right moment of yes, and the galaxy explodes in wondrous fecundity that saturates all imaginable possibility with life.

We deepen our recognition of the next right thing when we learn the timing of things, how they grow, how they each come into their season. There is a time for every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap; a time to seek and a time to lose; a time to speak and a time to keep silent. All life is governed by these ancient and eternal rhythms of day and night, inhale and exhale, the tides, the beat of the heart, the seasons of the earth.

Everything has its season. What we say, what we do, when we act, when we refrain from action or speech. Our greatest teacher, our most reliable inner wisdom that can guide our choices, select the timing of this or that decision, each in its proper time, arises in great measure from our natural entrainment with the rhythms of all life. We are made of this; this is the oxygen we breathe; this organic, essential, life-sustaining rhythm makes us who we are.

We are invited to learn well and intimately the seasons of the heart, the quiet movements of warmth and time and readiness that open and close in their time our love, our fear, our
uncertainty, our courage; to read such things, to listen for this
yes
embedded in our days, knowing, like this cactus, this rose, this hollyhock, the season to lay dormant and the season to explode in a fury of exuberance and color. Without striving or pushing, the simple grace of following the thread of timing and seasons and ripeness of things can be so graceful that, without forcing anything, our bodies, our hands, our eyes, our skin and noses and mouths can taste, feel, smell the rightness, the readiness, the moment of
kairos
, when the moment to act is perfect and ripe.

Our inner knowing of the next right thing can inspire with the same fierce conviction and faith of the crocus, seizing the only precisely perfect moment when we must break through whatever crust of ice remains between our dreams and the sun. We can resolve to awaken just a little more every single second, to pay such close attention to the deep readiness of things that we will come to know, trust, and act with courage, without hesitation, when the slightest twitch in time reveals for an instant the perfectly ready
yes
we are being granted in this, the only possible next, right season.

Beginner’s Mind

B
y attending to the subtle timing of seasons, how things move and grow from the inside out, we enhance our ability to name more accurately the next right thing. If we add another practice—what Suzuki Roshi calls
beginner’s mind—
we can also deepen our ability to see new and different choices available to us in the next moment. We begin by becoming more playful in recognizing previously invisible possibilities that already exist right here, right now. Suzuki Roshi explains: “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” I can offer a recent, humbling example from my own life.