When Enough is Not Enough

In the Adirondacks this week, we are having the gorgeous September weather that magically appears each year (though sometimes it doesn’t come until October). Clear blue skies for days on end are the set for the spectacular show of colored leaves. Twelve years and three weeks ago, in 2001, the weather was just like this when planes were crashing into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. For days the blue sky defied my attempts to grasp what had happened, to come to terms with a world in which people didn’t value their own lives as long as by killing themselves they could also kill others.

The mall attack in Nairobi, sectarian fighting in Iraq, the Syria gas attacks, the Sandy Hook shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing – all the killings that keep arriving on my radio each morning – clearly show that there is something wrong with the world. All humanity seems to be suffering from a sickness that we ourselves have created, with our tribalism, consumerism, greed, and isolation. There is something rotten in the state of Denmark. And everywhere else.

Every time these things happen, I wonder, what am I supposed to do in the face of this unbearable wrongness? After every one of these terrifying and idiotic demonstrations of what’s wrong with humanity, I think that I should just give up on this messed-up world, find my own “enough” here in the woods, and live a relatively safe, fulfilling life. It would be fulfilling. I don’t need all the misery of my interactions with the world. I can just retreat – not to hide from the awfulness but simply to stop participating, to sit by the edge of my pond and write, to tend my garden and go on long walks, to fully inhabit this world, this beautiful piece of the world that I have found and am lucky enough to live in. But that feels selfish even though it also feels necessary. I, personally, would have enough, but though I would be living in the moment, content with what I have, not fueling the greed cycle, would that be the right thing to do? Is having my own enough enough?

 

I have studied Buddhism informally for many years, meditating off and on, reading dharma teachings, at times participating in a sangha with likeminded friends. My understanding of Buddhism is that we should consider whatever we have at the moment to be enough. In the July 2005 issue of Shambhala Sun, Zenkei Blanche Hartman quotes Suzuki Roshi: “Just to be alive is enough.” But, sneakily, there is more to it. My favorite Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron, reminds us often that we have received an enormous gift of “this precious human birth”, and gratitude is one of the six paramitas or important practices. Zenkei Hartman writes, “Not only is life a gift, and practice a gift, everything we have, without exception, has come to us from the kindness of others.” So can we rest with our enough, or do we have to find ways to give back, to help others in return?

This past spring, as the world was greening up, my mom’s friend Jo -- the same age as her – unexpectedly dropped dead. That same week the Boston Marathon was bombed, a fertilizer factory in Texas blew up, and one morning my cat, Jigs, killed a gray jay that had been hanging around. It was the last event that hit me hardest, opening my heart to feel the pain of the others. This sweet bird, almost tame, had been sitting in a tree above our not-yet-planted garden, occasionally swooping over the fence to grab some bread my husband had thrown out there. Then suddenly it was a lifeless body in my cat’s mouth. I felt angry and guilty and sad. I am harboring, feeding, and yes, loving, a killer of innocent creatures.

I am not a “terrorist”, but there is still death in the world because of me, if not because of my cat then because my taxes go to fuel a giant greed and war machine. I can’t just sit serenely on the edge of my pond. I don’t know what to do to fix the world, but I can’t retreat from it either. While it would be enough for me, I do realize that it would not be enough.

 

 

 

Shellac and Dental Floss

Years ago, soon after I graduated from college, I was driving across the country with a friend, Matt. Along the way we listened to some of his Frank Zappa tapes. So it was that when we pulled into a gas station in Albuquerque, and the attendant told me he was “moving to Montana soon”, I had to ask, “To be a dental floss tycoon?”
 

You will not be surprised that all I got was a blank look.
 

And frankly, I would have given myself a blank look, too, if I hadn’t just been listening to the song. Despite having seen Zappa in concert when I was in high school, and having heard some of his songs at other times, I really don’t know much about him or his music. Basically I know just enough to say something that provokes a blank look in an Albuquerque gas station attendant.
 

This is true about so many things. I have a smattering of knowledge on many different subjects, but I’m sad to say there are very few concentrations. I know enough about writing to be able to teach it, and I know enough about teaching to be able to do it, but that about covers the areas where my knowledge has any depth.
 

I studied geology for four years in college and even worked in the field after graduation, but most of the time I’m reluctant to admit it because people then expect me to know something about it. I can identify some different types of rock, and I know just enough to understand why the Adirondacks are growing and how they can be such young mountains when their rock is incredibly old, but that’s about it.
 

One thing I do have is good grammar, but I don’t know the names of all the constructions, so when students ask me why something is wrong or right, I often struggle to explain it. In fact, what I generally do is act out the sentences to show why a particular piece of punctuation is so critical (because it just is!) Many years ago I got a job as the editor of a newspaper on the strength of my good grammar. For a year and a half I faked being a journalist, blundering through interviews and missing “scoops” left and right. But darn it, that paper was well edited! Amazingly, I did not get fired.

I feel like I squeak through life, knowing just barely enough to make it, though sometimes the knowledge I do (or did) have gets me in trouble. For example, when you’ve had four semesters of calculus, that may actually be a hindrance to figuring out how much plywood to order to cover a shed roof. It would have been a much simpler and I’m sure more accurate calculation if, instead of doing algebra, I had just drawn a picture and figured out how many 4 by 8 sheets were needed to fill the dimensions of the roof. Unfortunately, the confidence with which I put forth my calculation convinced my husband, so he was understandably mad when we had to go back to the lumber yard to get another sheet.
 

Luckily for me, I have a terrible memory. Very little of importance stays in it. That’s good because I easily forget the bad things that happen (like how mad Bruce was about the plywood). The bad news is that my daughter is constantly frustrated that I don’t remember what I told her five minutes earlier, let alone a day or a week ago. Trivia seems to last, though, and certain triumphs. For example, I will never forget being proven right when my husband doubted that the word “shellac” indicated that the substance was made from the shells of lac beetles. I don’t really know anything else about shellac, other than that people use it to protect wood. Or at least they used to. (Has it been replaced by polyurethane? Is shellac the same as lacquer? I’m assuming the “lac” part is the same…)
 

How much is it necessary to know in life, anyway? In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Albus Dumbledore has a “pensive”, a weird magical device in which he can deposit thoughts and memories so they don’t clutter up his brain. Nowadays people have smartphones to do that. I don’t have either, but truthfully, I don’t know if either would help me because the important thoughts would probably be gone before I could download them to the device. And just as before, all I’d be left with would be shellac and dental floss.

The "S" Word

How can we, as a society, make it possible for everyone to have enough? According to some, including Bill and Melinda Gates, as well as President Obama, the answer is college. I teach college, so I should be very excited about this. After all, it’s job security. But given how expensive college has become, is it really the right path for all students?

Many think that the only purpose of college is to help students get jobs. New York’s Governor Cuomo has proposed performance-based funding for colleges, in which the school only gets state money if students are able to find employment within a short time after graduation. Peter Thiel andCharles Murray have gone further and argued that students should be able to gettheir money back if they do go to college but don’t get jobs in their fields. (That sounds good, but frankly it might not be the college’s fault if the student is unemployable or if the economy is so bad that there are no jobs, etc. And I say this as someone who graduated with a ton of debt and not only did not get a job in my field but ended up working at a discount bookstore for $4.25 an hour. I’d love to blame it on my college and get my money back, but it’s not their fault I majored in the wrong subject.)

Are there other purposes to college than simply getting a job? Is it the right path for all? My English Comp. students and I have written about this many times in class, and I had three sections of Comp in the same semester, so I ended up thinking fairly deeply about the topic. Then I had an “aha” moment (which will probably seem pretty obvious to everyone else).

None of this would matter if college were free.

If college were free, or very, very cheap, it wouldn’t matter if graduates got a job in their field or not. College would be a low- or no-stakes way to try out different things, learn about the world and about yourself, and grow up a bit before striking out on your own. It would allow students to try the college path, and if it were not the right one, they could then do something else without having lost anything or gone into debt. It would allow poor students the same opportunities as rich ones. Our society might (gasp!) become more equal. (Or it might not. After all, high school is free, and rich parents still pay huge sums to send their kids to private schools where they make the contacts the will help them stay rich forever…)

So I decided that college should be free. There might be a clause that if you screw up badly you then have to pay or get kicked out, but the starting gate would be open to all. Why not? After all, the social costs of an uneducated population are huge, ranging from welfare to crime and incarceration to higher disease and death rates. It would be much cheaper to just pay for everyone to go to college. It’s pretty obvious what we should do. So why aren’t we doing it?

I racked my brain for a while before realizing what the problem is. Socialism. The “S” word. For some reason anything that smacks of everyone getting equal shares of anything is anathema to the general public, despite the fact that they themselves would benefit in any number of ways. We don’t want everyone to have free health care and we don’t want everyone to have free education. It seems like people would rather not get something good if they know someone else is going to get it also, which feels kind of twisted to me. (I think they should take a lesson from my 10-year-old daughter. When she gets a cool new toy, she actually wants all her friends to have the same thing so they can play together. But she’s just a kid. What does she know?)

Is it because, “I had to work hard for what I got, and walk 10 miles in the snow uphill both ways, and I never got any handouts, dammit, so no one else should get them either”? Or is it that people are afraid of what more people with a “liberal” education might do? Then again, maybe they’re just cheap.

For it is true that nothing is really free. Taxes would certainly go up if health care and college were paid for. But we would have a more prosperous, productive society, and we would be able to afford to pay more. If everyone were healthy and educated, there would be less crime and more money for all. Everyone would have enough.

I still cannot fathom why people don’t think this is a good thing, so I guess I should call up my old school and ask for my money back. Clearly they did not do a good job educating me, or I would be able to understand.

A Creditable Cautionary Tale

I got my first credit card when I was 18. It was a “Coop” card, for the “bookstore” Harvard and MIT each had branches of. This was a bookstore in the same sense that Wal-Mart is. Books were a minor offering. There were clothes, toiletries, games, bedding, jewelry… I took advantage of all of it. As a result, there has not been one debt-free moment in my entire adult life. I am 45 now, almost 46.

It’s not that I didn’t know the value of money. Even in high school I knew enough to steal the change from the jar in my parents’ closet so I could buy cigarettes and vanilla frosting. I even knew how to work for money. From age 11, my parents paid me for cooking meals and doing laundry. If I cooked, I got 50 cents. Cleaning up afterward would double that. I seem to recall laundry netting a dollar, but that may have been for more than one load. I even got money for “babysitting” myself. When I began babysitting for other kids, I started accumulating real riches. Or I would have, except that I always found something to spend those riches on – usually something ephemeral like candy.

Addiction can certainly eat away at a budget, and even though candy, frosting, and cigarettes are cheaper than cocaine (and back then cigarettes were much cheaper), when your appetite for them is bottomless, you can still spend all you have and then find yourself stealing to get more.

Of course, spending money, too, is an addiction, even more so when it’s done on a plastic card that just goes back in your pocket after the transaction, as if nothing has happened. I discovered this early on in life. Sure, the bill would come each month, but for each $100 I had spent, I would only have to pay $5-10 in minimum payment. What a deal!

I graduated college at age 20 with both credit card and student loan debt of more than $25,000. I am not sure if I have yet paid that off, even though the banks and loan agencies say I did. I did so many convoluted transactions with that money that credit default swaps actually seem tame in comparison. I consolidated loans. I put them on forbearance so I could travel or work for minimum wage. I took out new credit cards with “Zero Percent Interest When You Transfer a Balance!” I went to graduate school and added $18,000 more in student loans. At this point I don’t know how much more there was from credit cards, but I had to have my sushi dinners and nights out with friends, right? After all, I was living in New York City!

Later I got married and we bought a house (with a mortgage, of course). After a few years we refinanced and used the new equity to consolidate our old debts. Hey – no more student loans! No more credit cards! No more car loans! This would have been great except that I kept using the credit cards and we bought another new car with a loan. Luckily a home equity credit line came along just in time.

All of this sounds awful to me now. My chest is constricting as I write about how I* suffocated myself under these bricks of debt, but at the time I thought nothing of it. Here and there I’d have a few moments of panic or clarity where I’d realize how little freedom I had in my life because I had to pay these debts, but those moments would pass and the next time I wanted something, out would come the card.

Gradually over the last several years I have woken up from the free money dream. We cut up our cards so that even if we weren’t moving forward we could at least stop moving backward. But the biggest wake-up came a few years ago when we inherited some money. Suddenly here was a finite sum – not quite enough to pay everything off, but close. I wanted to pay off as much as possible, but it was scary because then that money would be gone and there would be no getting it back. I was afraid that then we wouldn’t have enough.

I know, the irony is obvious. When I had no money, I felt rich, but when we finally got some, I felt poor. I guess when something doesn’t seem real to you, the concept of having “enough” of it doesn’t even make sense. Do I have enough fairy dust in my life? Enough clouds made of marshmallow?

Now money isn’t fairy dust to me anymore, and I’ve cut up and thrown away my magic wands. Suddenly the world is like that scene in the Wizard of Oz when the curtain is pulled back to reveal that there was no magic, only fakery. In the movie, the characters discovered that they didn’t need the wizard’s magic because they had had what they needed all along. Is that true for me as well? Can I go back to Kansas under my own power and turn my castle in the air into a solid home on the ground, on a real foundation? I’ll keep you posted.

*Even though I am married, I can’t implicate my husband in any of this. He had gone merrily throughout his life without ever having a credit card when he met me. I was the vile temptress who led him down the road to perdition.

 

Red Ant Soup

I remember watching a documentary about Cambodia. People were being paid a few cents an hour to dig a trench by hand, with picks and shovels. Men and women dug side by side, covered with sweat and dirt. The trench was for a fiber optic cable. The woman the camera was following left the trench that night to cook dinner for her children on a campfire in the nearby woods where they were going to sleep. But first they had to find the food – red ant nests, which they boiled to make soup for dinner. And somehow that was enough, enough at least to sleep and get up and go back to the trench to make a little more money.

Making Red Ant Soup

Many years ago I visited a friend who was in the Peace Corps in Tanzania. The village where he lived was a tiny one. At night the stars were stupendous because there were no electric lights for a hundred miles around. Matt kept a bucket under the open tap in the tub because the water only flowed sometimes and you never knew when it would be. The underground water pipe leading to the building was broken, making a perpetual puddle in front of the building entrance. This is where people came, with buckets, to get their water, from the puddle on the ground. It had to be filtered and boiled before it could be used. Clearly this was enough for them, though, or wouldn’t someone have fixed the pipe?

There were little restaurants around the area, small buildings, with a few small tables. They all had hand-painted menus that covered whole walls – dishes made from chicken, goat, and beef with rice, bread and many other things. The first time we went to a restaurant, I made the mistake of reading the menu to see what to order. But when I asked for what I wanted, the man behind the counter laughed and shook his head. “Today we have chicken and rice.”  That was all. So I had chicken, cooked in tomato and garlic, with bits of tomato skin curled in the sauce, over rice. It was delicious. It was enough. I went there other times. Chicken and rice was all they ever had. I wondered if the menu on the wall was from a more prosperous time or if it was wishful thinking. Or maybe it was there just to tell customers how good the cook was because he could cook all those different dishes – could, if the ingredients happened to be available, which they never were. Other than in the capital, Dar es Salaam, in a hotel, every restaurant I went to in the country was like this -- long menus but only one dish on offer.

There were actually many remnants of a more prosperous time around Tanzania. We would be riding down long roads with fields of grass or sunflowers on both sides, and come upon an eighteen-wheeler or a large combine rusting in the field. They were from colonial times perhaps; when they had broken down, and no one from the west was there to fix them, they just sat and rusted. In Dar there were tall buildings, ten, twelve stories, with no glass left in the windows, and no functioning elevators. But people still lived there. The paved roads were worse than they would have been if they had been left as dirt because giant potholes had opened up, big enough to swallow a VW beetle, and no one had repaved. Yet now the Tanzanians were “free” from colonial rule, and the ones I met seemed happy enough. Perhaps it’s like Aesop’s fable about the dog and the wolf.

 

In the little village where Matt lived, in addition to the rundown apartments, were tiny huts that housed families. I often saw little boys outside the huts, thin wiry boys with very short hair. To a one they all wore pants, usually cut off somewhere around the knee, but with no seat. Where the back pockets should be, there was nothing but round, brown flesh. No one seemed to notice or care. The boys played or worked, wearing seatless pants. They seemed happy enough. They had enough to eat, though much of it was ugali, this thick corn paste that eliminated hunger because it clogged up the entire digestive tract for hours. I don’t think it had much nutritional value but it was good for holding a little bit of stewed vegetables, grown in a subsistence plot outside the hut. Perhaps some meat occasionally made it into the stew pot. I sometimes saw a skinny cow or goat in someone’s yard.

Livestrong.com says “The minimum survivable calories varies between individuals, with 600 to 1000 given as a standard range, according to the U.S. Army Survival Handbook. The less active an individual is, the fewer calories he can eat and still survive.”

I wonder if red ant soup meets these caloric guidelines. Certainly the glue Kenyan street children sniff instead of eating food does not. Meanwhile, back in Northern New York, my angst is over how much food we gather from our small garden every day and whether we will be able to eat it all. A refrigerator, full of leftovers, stresses me out because I don’t want to waste anything. Eating 1800 calories a day is being on a diet.

Remember when your parents would tell you to eat all your dinner because there were kids starving in India (Africa, or wherever)? I, and many other children, would say, “Send it to them.” Now that I have seen more of the world, I wonder how it is possible that I and this Cambodian woman and these Tanzanian children all live on the same planet. Now I truly wish I could send them the food. It's no longer just a smart aleck response to my parents.

(Making Red Ant Soup)