“If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life but still the same amount of snow.”
–Unknown
Month: November 2018
Editing My Bucket List
Another blog I read recently asked readers what hobbies are on their bucket lists. The post got me thinking about goals and priorities. When I was in my early teens, I wrote a loooong bucket list (before bucket lists had a name) and taped it inside my bedroom closet to look at from time to time. I don’t remember everything that was on the list, but I know it was ambitious and all over the place. It included things like learning to ride horses, to play a musical instrument, to speak various languages, and living abroad. It was a lined piece of notebook paper with a dream handwritten on every line. Most of the entries were not things I’d thought about extensively, but rather things that just seemed like they’d be cool to do, or to be able to say I’d done.
Quote of the Week
“I don’t say no because I am so busy. I say no because I don’t want to be so busy.”
Enough
I am enough. I have enough. I do enough.
I am doing enough. I have done enough. I did enough. I gave enough. I tried hard enough.
This is enough for me. You are enough. To be here is enough. It is enough just to be alive.
Love is enough. There is enough love. There is enough to go around. There’s enough for everyone. There’s already enough. We have enough to give freely.
Enough said. Enough already. I’ve had enough. We’ve had enough of this. Enough of that. Enough!
That’s enough. That’s good enough. Relax now; you’ve done enough. You are enough.
*Today’s post is a little unusual, a poem of sorts. This piece was born of a middle-of-the-night contemplation of abundance and sufficiency at the beginning of a season characterized by excess: more things, more commitments, more food. My mind settled on the word enough and its many uses. It’s an understated but powerful word, signaling, paradoxically, both acceptance and an unwillingness to accept any longer. It settles peacefully into contentment, or it draws a line in the sand. Perhaps it does both at the same time. “Enough of all that; I have enough already.”
(It’s also just a beautifully strange word when you look at it and say it over and over again.)
Quote of the Week
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
—Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
