Just a Little More

Some ramblings from a book on Mindfulness by Venerable Henepola Gunaratana and the great thing about a name like that is that I don't care if I misspell it because . . . c'mon . . . who's gonna know? 

"Because of the simple fact that you are human, you  find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life which simply will not go away.  You have a vague awareness that something is wrong.  But there is really a whole realm of depth and sensitivity in life, somehow, you are just not seeing it.  You wind up feeling cut off.  The world looks like the usual foul place, which is boring at best.  This impulse at discontent is a monster inside all of us, and it has many arms: chronic tension, lack of genuine compassion for others, including the people closest to you, feelings being blocked up, and emotional deadness.  It is a constant undercurrent in every thought and every perception; a little wordless voice that keeps saying, 'Not good enough yet.  Got to have more.  Got to make it better.  Got to be better.'  Watch the news.  Listen to the lyrics in popular songs.  You find the same theme repeated over and over in variations.  Jealousy, suffering, discontent, and stress.  We are stuck in the 'if only' syndrome."

I do need these reminders that what I got is enough and by "enough" I mean a shit-ton more than I deserve or need or that most other people have.  I'm drowning in stuff and friends and family and blessings and experiences and yet I think: "More, please."

I return over and over to the possibly apocryphal quote attributed to J.P. Morgan at a time when he was the wealthiest man in the world.  He was asked how much was enough.  "A little bit more," he was reputed to have said.  When we moved from OH to CA we had to downsize.  We got rid of a lot of shit and I mean a lot of shit and we still moved way too much stuff, most of it then ejected in our new home.  It was exhausting dealing with all of that stuff.  Much of it I didn't want and nobody else I knew wanted it and we couldn't convince any strangers to give us even a few dollars for it and the fucking thrift stores probably threw away everything we gave them but it was still hard to loosen our grip on it.  Today it's still gone and I don't miss it.  I can honestly say that I can barely remember any times where I consciously missed a piece of stuff that I used to have.