What Might "Enough" Look Like?

From up close, enough is getting home and opening the refrigerator. I see eggs, meat, yogurt, milk, cold cuts, fruit, vegetables, leftovers in various unwieldy containers. It is a beef stew that’s at least as much beef as stew. It is the warm floor under my feet when I walk around in my socks in the winter. It is each of us on our own computer, working or playing. It is listening to the rain beat on the roof but not feeling it on my head. It is driving to work, knowing my husband too has a car and I don’t have to worry about leaving him stranded. It is being able to donate money to others so that they, too, can have enough.

 

From far away, enough looks like a window glowing with light, many windows, as I rise above the ground and can see more and more of the landscape. It is a neat little town or a bustling city where everyone has an indoor space to shelter in, and the people out on the streets are there because they want to be and not because they’re begging. Outside of the cities and towns are big dark spaces,
wilderness, trees, deserts, mountains, lakes, oceans… places where we can go to replenish when we have “had enough”. Everyone can get there if they want. There is a chicken, or at least some kind of food, in every pot. Everyone who wants a child or a mate has one. All pets have homes.

 

Why is this not the way the world is? Why do some have so much more than they “need” and others so much less? Or do they? Does every multimillionaire feel like he has enough? (If he did, why would he keep lobbying for more tax breaks?) Does every single mother with a minimum wage job feel poor, or does she feel like she has enough? What is the standard by which people judge “enough”?

Growing up, I never felt like I had enough – love, money, food, stuff – nothing. And yet I am a fortunate one, American, middle class. I never really thought about “enough” until one day my five-year-old (at the time) daughter, having heard me say over and over that we couldn’t afford this or that, asked me, “Are we the poorest people in the world?” The preposterousness of the question made a crack in my own feelings of deprivation. It was only when explaining to her that no, in fact compared to most of the world we Americans were incredibly wealthy, that I began to realize it for myself. As the new age motivationalists say, I began to see things from the perspective of abundance rather than scarcity. It was a good wake-up moment for me, but it started a train of questions that I’ve been traveling on for several years now, questions about wealth and “enough” and personal contentment versus helping others.

 

Was there anything we needed that we didn’t have? Nothing. We had food, clothing and shelter. We had belonging, love, power, survival, and fun. Sure it would be nice to have more money, but I couldn’t imagine us ever having to go without anything important.

 

So I explained to Cedar about children who have no homes, or who sleep eight to a room, who are always hungry and have to wear the same clothes every day, who are grateful for any sort of toy, even the little pieces of junk from the dollar store that we take for granted and send around the world for Operation Christmas Child. I would love to show Cedar a third world country so she can get an understanding of rich and poor and see clearly which one we are.

 

It amazes me that we can be this wealthy in comparison to, say, Tanzanians, and then there are people who have so much more money than we do – a far bigger percentage more than what we have more than the poorest. We might have 200 times more than a little Tanzanian boy with no seat to his pants. But these super rich have 200 times more than we do. How can both be enough? Or not enough? How is it that we can feel poor or that a billionaire can feel he needs to skimp on food for his guests, when children in Cambodia are lucky to get ant soup for dinner?