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.