A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough (7 page)

No movement was required;
nothing need move anywhere
ever, again
.

How much,
I wondered,
would that cost?

The Practice of the Next Right Thing

A
fter having breakfast with his wife, the poet e.e. cummings went to his study to work on his poems for the morning. At noon, when his wife called him to lunch, he came in smiling. She asked, “How did your morning go?” He smiled again. “Splendid, just splendid.” “What did you do?” “Well, when I left you after breakfast, I took a comma out. And just now, I put it back in.”

A life of enough is seeded in these choice points. If our choices feel right and true, if we hold them, listen to them, and act upon them clearly and well each successive moment—regardless how seemingly small or insignificant—we are more likely to feel fruitful and sufficient, moment by moment, choice by choice. But if those same choices feel hurried, fearful, or constricted, they will leave us feeling worried and empty, which, over time, leads to a perpetual sense of fearful scarcity that roots deep and long in our hearts and bodies.

If we lose the thread of the moment because we are in desperate pursuit of something far away and a long time coming, each moment we live is another moment spent waiting for some elusive promise of enough—a promise that is postponed, delayed, broken, again and again, until we feel bereft of any real expectation that it will ever really come our way.

Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, said “Do not store your treasure in barns, where moth and rust corrupt. Seek instead the fruits of the kingdom, and all these other things will be given you.” These fruits of the kingdom are the ultimate
why
of our life journey. To love and be loved, to feel safely held, to feel reliably guided by deep, inner spiritual wisdom, these are why we live, why we plant things that grow and nourish others, why we raise children while trying to make for them a better world, why we offer our gifts to the family of the earth. Our treasures, possessions, houses, responsibilities are simply tools, the
how
s of our life’s deeper purpose. And, like all tools, they are subject to loss and impermanence.

If we are busy building toward the vague reward of enough in some distant future, we can more easily miss whatever signal or information may be arising within our bodies and hearts in this moment and disregard the impact our daily choices have on our sense of enough in this moment. If we spend all our moments planning some harvest of ease and sufficiency later in life—while feeling anxious and empty along the way—can we really expect our lives to change in years to come when we refuse to attend to changes asking for our attention right now?

Following this thread is like following breadcrumbs from God, nourishing clues on a path we walk moment by moment, leaning into a vigorous reliance upon our heart’s knowing and an unshakable faith in our intuitive capacity to listen for, and know, what must and must not be done. Our reasons will not necessarily be recognized by “acceptable” standards, so we need sufficient clarity to act on what may seem foolish, capricious choices. We are called to speak and act from our deepest confidence, with the conviction that we are following something
deep and sacred that will reliably guide us to the next right thing. And when we listen and act from this place of trust and faith in our heart’s desire for love, sufficiency, and truth, this inexplicable inner feeling of rightness will lead us to something essential, ever closer to the center of whatever we are ultimately seeking.

This is, of course, nothing at all revolutionary or new. For ages people have described feeling guided by the Holy Spirit, following the will of God, or living in respectful obedience to the ways of the Great Spirit; others take refuge in the precepts of right speech, right mindfulness, or right action. In each case there has been an unmistakable commitment to listen carefully to voices and forces that guide and inform both our own hearts and the heart of the world. It is a vital, intimate relationship to be in this eternal conversation, listening within, and responding into, the next right thing that will reveal what we need and open the way to some reliable, already present sufficiency in this moment.

This means we must be willing to listen with the ear of the heart to the timing of things, to let go of any plan or requirement that does not feel in this moment authentically ripe or ready. We must allow a different moment to arise which, if ready, will push itself up through concrete if necessary to reveal that the ripeness of its season is genuine and will not be denied.

Just as wire serves to conduct electricity, when we are grounded in all we know and have become, fiercely trusting in this essential wholeness of our intuitive integrity, we simply do what we know to be enough. But if we are not yet clear, if we cannot yet see our way, if we cannot claim this authentic
inner knowing, then we do nothing. This nothing, this waiting, becomes the only possible next right thing. For this we need a strong commitment to practice patience and mercy with ourselves and others, to wait for the one choice that will bring sufficiency in this moment.

The choice we make, again and again, is this: Will we shape our moments, days, years, inspired by our deepest heart’s wisdom and authentic knowing where the thread of sufficiency and grace will lead us? Or shall we be driven today and always by external cultural and organizational requirements, demands, fears, and coercions?

There is yet another powerful hindrance on the path to a sufficient life. Even if we do know in our heart what is true in this moment and have learned to fully trust our intuition and absolutely rely on the accuracy of our inner wisdom in any given situation—knowing the truth is not the same as acting on it.

This is crucial for us to appreciate, for many of us have, since childhood, either learned or been taught to disregard our honest feelings or clear sense of the truth—in order to serve the greater good, to keep the peace, to not cause trouble, to not cause a scene, rock the boat. Women, for example, represent one group among many who have been especially singled out, told they should learn to go along to get along, to be quiet and demure, to not disagree with elders, men, or even other women.

One friend told me she often feels like the essential validity of her sense of right and wrong must be clouded by her high-strung emotionality, her flighty moods, her menstrual cycle, her hormones—as some of the more dismissive thinking
goes. While one might easily demonstrate that there are few women unable to tell with astonishing accuracy what is really happening in any given situation, there are far fewer who ever feel the safety, the right, or even the permission to do or say anything about it.

So in order to live well from the inside out, to listen for the right choices and then firmly and courageously act on them, we simply cannot do this alone. It is impossible, isolating, even dangerous for those who, because of their race, gender, religion, or class are at risk for physical, social, or political harm.

Because we are not taught or supported to live in this way, rarely educated or encouraged to listen and act from our own inner wisdom, never told how to follow the firm but invisible thread of the next right thing through the world, we will always need the support of good, honest friends. We are called to be strong companions and clear mirrors with one another, to seek those who reflect with compassion and a keen eye how we are doing, whether we seem centered or off course, grounded or flailing. As in all sacred, life-giving practices that require a deep and confident faith in ourselves, we need the nourishing company of others to create the circle needed for growth, freedom, and healing.

Our choices are sacraments. They lift up invisible, sacred truths and, through the process of choosing and acting, make them manifest and alive in the world. Our choices may seem like small, tender things, insignificant in the eyes of the very big and complicated story of the world. But, like a small piece of bread or a tiny sip of wine, they hold great power and meaning in our lives, and they can change the shape and destiny of more people and events than we will ever know.

In
The Awakened Heart
, Gerald May offers this powerful instruction to those of us who dare live with hearts awake to the vital assurance of love and sufficiency in each moment:

Keep risking that your heart’s desire is trustworthy. There is always another, deeper step you can take toward more complete trust. It will be this way until every act of every day is simply sacred.

It may not feel like enough; sometimes it feels like nothing. But it is sufficient because it is real.

PART THREE
who we are
and what we know
is enough

Our Intrinsic Worth

M
y friend and teacher Henri Nouwen wrote a book called
The Wounded Healer
, and the phrase soon entered the lexicon of clergy, doctors, nurses, and caregivers everywhere. It seemed so impossibly apt, deeply undeniable, and very simply true. So many people in the helping professions carry their own secret scars. Wounded in some way, they have taken up the mantle of healer in part to heal themselves by bringing healing to a world that had given them suffering.

I convened a circle in southern Mississippi a year after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. In the circle were people who had helped. They had fed, clothed, held, fought for, lifted up, and buried their friends, families, neighbors, and strangers. They had been promised supplies by a government that never got around to sending anything but contempt and a sigh of relief that so many poor folks had so conveniently been disposed of.

They were bone-weary. These women and men, young and old, black and white, sat together with me, listening for where, somewhere in the bowels of something true, there might remain some impossible shred, spark, fragment of hope, light, love, or healing. So we huddled together in a circle, something humans do when we know nothing else has helped, and listened
together. We listened for some voice, or grace, or gift to be born in our company. “Where two or more are gathered,” said Jesus, the spirit quickens, softening one another’s hardness of heart until tears, like the waters that had brought such death and destruction, could slowly, tentatively, trickle into some soil where some living thing may one day again—not now, not soon, but one day—with the grace of a billion angels, possibly grow into something beautiful, necessary, true.

In the silent circle, one of us, a man who had worked as a lawyer for over forty years on the poor and ragged Gulf Coast of Mississippi, who had dedicated his practice, his life’s work to helping others, began to weep. All in the room were silent. The sound of his pain filled the warm, humid, early southern summer air.

“I’m so afraid,” gentle, quiet, to no one and everyone, “that I haven’t done anything with my life that has any value at all.”

People in the room were stunned. They knew of his love, his countless gifts, his devotion, his kindness. After digesting the impossibility of his words with their knowing ears, one by one they began to offer example after example of people, causes, groups, communities he had saved, helped, healed. They ached so for him to be able to drink deep from the loving testimony to his goodness, his work, his essential worth and value. He was, one said, a treasure.

After they spoke, he remained silent. I asked him to share his heart’s truth at that moment. “I cannot help it. I feel my work has been so useless.”

How can both of these things be true?

I asked everyone in the circle to hold two things at once in
their hearts and hands. One, that he was good and honorable; two, that he was convinced in the marrow of his bones, the deepest cells of his heart tissue, that this was the most true thing he could say in this circle, in this moment, to these beautiful people, on this afternoon. He felt he had been a failure.

I wondered how many others could truthfully, at one time or another, say they have felt the same? Slowly, painfully, in a moment of the most tender honesty, every hand in the room moved slowly upward, as if in some powerless confession offered to some faraway heaven.

This reveals one of the deepest confusions that lodges in our heart. We offer what we can, do what we are able—and, in the end, whatever we have given, healed, done, created, fixed, and given birth, somehow it never, ever feels like enough. Worse still, the feeling leeches into tissue and bone so deep that we ourselves begin to believe that the gift of our best and most loving presence and attention, our own intrinsic worth as friends, parents, neighbors, our value as colleagues, citizens, helpers, or kind-hearted people, is doomed to feel somehow never good enough.

How can this be? Many of us carry old, familiar voices of judgment and dismissal, voices that remind us of our inadequacies, shortcomings, and failures. Regardless our work, our contribution, our gifts, we always feel like we could have, should have, done better. Since there is always room for improvement, these judging voices never run out of good material to use as a weapon against our feeling good, whole, or complete, just as we are. If we remain convinced that we are essentially defective or incomplete, we are reluctant to trust our own sense of whether
what we feel is accurate, whether our inner compass is sound, whether we can ever really be sure of how things are, in ourselves or the world.

But to make any good decision, we have to understand what we are choosing. We need good information that we can trust will be true. If we feel damaged or defective, how can we possibly trust what we feel or believe, what our heart tells us is true, or what our intuitive wisdom senses is the right choice? If we cannot trust our own tools or instruments, how can we build with confidence anything that will feel sturdy and whole? We learn to guide the course of our lives by making choices that feel good, right, and true for us. Such choices, made well, naturally evoke a deep sense of sufficiency and well-being. Our work, then, is first to become clear and loving mirrors for one another, reflecting back to each other our own essential wisdom, our inherent clarity of insight, and our reliable inner wholeness.