A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough (19 page)

Given the chance, our kids can help us to reclaim the spaciousness and delight in all our lives. They can help us be present to the moment, not constantly rushing past this time to fulfill the next obligation. If, instead of forcing them to adhere to our schedules, we took the opportunity for unhurried time with them every day, stopped and allowed their pace and their attention to capture us, we might find that such moments of delight provide more than enough unexpected surprises and unplanned gifts that we can carry easily and playfully through the day.

Stephanie’s Christmas

S
tephanie is a vibrant, gifted woman, consultant to many high-powered executives and organizations. She and I have known each other for many years and have volunteered together on projects we both cared about.

In our circle, she shared that, as a married woman with no children of her own, she, in her words, “collects children.” So last Christmas, she polled all her friends who were parents of young children and invited their children to all come to her house. Most parents relish a break from their rushing about with errands, getting everything ready before Christmas, and it is nearly impossible to do it all with young children constantly underfoot.

So on a late December Saturday, Stephanie found herself with a house full of children—seventeen children, in fact, and all between the ages of two and nine years old.

With no teacher’s aide (and Stephanie is not a teacher), she managed to supply them all with enough art supplies to last the whole day. She had paper and crayons, she had popsicle sticks and glitter, she had markers and glue and tape and colored paper and every kind of art or craft material. She arranged for children to help one another with activities that would fit their
age, so each child would feel they were competent and happy with whatever they had chosen to create.

At the end of the day, she had a wrapping station, where kids took turns wrapping one another’s artwork as gifts to bring back home to their families. When the kids got home, they began pestering their parents for more and more art materials to keep close at hand in their own homes.

One sweet harvest of this day was that the parents, who told Stephanie about their children’s’ triumphant return home that afternoon, reported that a change had come over their children. Almost to a one, they had all been so enthralled with the making of art and creating gifts for their families that they stopped asking about their own lists they had made for what they wanted for Christmas and instead began to ask for whom else they could make gifts.

For many families, Christmas has become an opportunity for children to relentlessly pester, beg, and bother their parents, asking for, even demanding, all the toys, games, and presents they want this year.

For many families, the problem of What is enough? is a perennial Christmas nightmare that gets worse year by year. How much to spend, how many presents to buy, whether each child gets the same thing, the same amount? Must they spend more the older children get, as their wants become more expensive and their expectations for more, and more, every year, send parents to store after store, terrified they will disappoint?

After that magical Saturday afternoon, Stephanie and the children had somehow turned Christmas into a chance to imagine what kinds of creations they could make that would bring happiness to others.

One Sufficient Life

F
our years ago, I visited a center that provides care, loving companionship, and support for women living with cancer, in a large Victorian house that feels very much like the warm and welcoming home it is. The staff are kind, gentle, and competent, and it was a delight to spend time with them and the women they served over the course of the day.

This spring, they invited me to spend another day at their center, and I readily accepted. When I arrived, I heard from several staff members that “Elaine is going to see you today.” Apparently, when I had visited four years before, Elaine had met me, heard me speak at an evening lecture, and was eager to tell me how deeply her life had changed since we last spoke. When Elaine arrived, we found a quiet room, closed the door behind us, and sat down facing one another.

Elaine was luminous.

Four years earlier, Elaine had, just three weeks before my visit, received a diagnosis of breast cancer. At that time, she felt crushed, terrified, and desperate, had spoken to very few people about her condition, and felt isolated, alone, and terribly frightened. She was confused about what to do, where to begin, how to think, act, or make choices in the face of this horrible tragedy that had suddenly, without warning, taken her
whole life and changed everything in an instant. When she heard me speak four years before, it was her first visit to the center. She had known nothing about the services they provided or about me or my work. A friend suggested she go and just listen that night. She sat in the back, spoke to no one, and went home.

Today, four years later, what Elaine wanted to tell me was that she returned to the center after that and, with help from the counselors, nurses, and medical team, had received the best care for her body and spirit. She learned yoga, meditation, and new ways to care for herself. Now she wanted to tell me how much what I had said had meant to her. It had given her hope, helped her imagine that some kind of healing was possible, and that she didn’t have to be or do any of this alone.

The Elaine who now sat in front of me was a beacon of clarity, strength, and hope. She was vital, alive, happy, and grateful. She had become the kind of person others in need seek out for comfort, unconditional support, and love. She wanted to thank me for all I had done to help her change her life completely from the inside out. She felt literally reborn, a more courageous, free, generous, and happy woman than she had ever been before. I was so moved by her story and grateful to be in her presence.

“What happened?” I asked. “How did you find this place inside, this amazing, energetic hopeful woman?”

She answered right away, “That’s what I am telling you. It was something about your words that helped me get here.” As flattering as it may have been for me to believe I had any such thing to do with this transformation, the truth was, after four more years on the road, I was at that moment feeling
bone-weary, distracted, not very centered, even a little discouraged. I was clearly
not
the mentor of this luminous being across from me.

“Elaine,” I said, “I am asking you as a student. Last time, perhaps I was a teacher in some useful way, and if I was, I am deeply thankful. But now, you are the teacher. I am asking for something you have, some inner orientation of heart, some daily practice that helps you to live so freely and joyfully. Please. This time,
I
am asking for
your
counsel.”

I am sure this was not what she was expecting. It took me a while to convince her I was serious, that I was actually seeking whatever advice she might have for me. She started by confessing something that I was not expecting. “No one knows this but my husband,” she began, “but I am dying. I am at stage four and have maybe six more months to live.”

I realized that I had not asked but simply presumed, because of her luminous appearance and contagious optimism, that her cancer had been cured. I had attributed her positive, courageous demeanor to some tremendous success in her physical healing. “But,” she continued, “that doesn’t really matter anymore. What matters is that I had the chance to live my life, this
amazing
life, to live for a while with my family, my husband, and all the people I love.”

I was stunned. I sat, silently for some time, allowing this to somehow find a place in my heart. Then I asked again, “What, then, do you do? How do you live each day? What practices nourish this grace, this clarity, this loving-kindness in you?”

She thought for a moment. “All I can say is that there are two things I just stopped doing. First, I stopped holding on to any resentments.” She explained she no longer had energy or
space in her body or heart for resenting people who had hurt her or treated her unkindly. At that particular moment I was acutely aware of holding some very strong resentment toward someone who had recently broken my heart. I quizzed her at length about how she forgave and let go of those resentments that arose in her life.

“Then,” she continued, “I only surround myself with life-giving people.”

This I instantly understood. “How good are you at doing that?” I wondered.

“It took time at first, learning to say no, to set clear boundaries. It was especially hard to let go of not wanting to disappoint people,” she replied. “But now,” she added, with a twinkle in her eyes, “I am very, very good at it.”

Elaine, her very life at stake, had learned what would be absolutely necessary, the minimum requirement, spiritually and emotionally
enough
for every last day of her life. These two clear, potent practices became the foundation for her inner healing. Like so many, Elaine had not been cured, but she had, nonetheless, been healed. With these two gifts to me, she had generously completed some beautiful circle of giving and receiving, offering me the keys to her freedom. Elaine had found her bedrock of emotional strength, her wellspring of spiritual nourishment. She had offered me her most precious gift, the hard-won fruits of her excruciating, impossibly good and deeply sufficient life.

PART FIVE
living a
life of
enough

Happiness from the Inside Out

Most folks are about as happy as they make their minds up to be
.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

A
s we have seen, much of what nourishes and supports our essential happiness begins from the inside. Abraham Lincoln was president during a most horrific, violent, bloody civil war that tore apart the hearts of young men, families, and communities everywhere. He suffered long periods of depression, lost several of his young children, and he lived with the excruciating anguish and burden of his wife’s incurable mental illness.

So these few words about happiness were, for Lincoln, no easy cliché but potent, hard-won wisdom. No matter what the ever-changing circumstances of our life, there comes a moment when we must choose the ground upon which we will stand to face whatever slings and arrows of misfortune have their way with us. Will we collapse, or will we stand?

What makes us happy? For several decades, researchers have probed this question, and their findings are intriguing. First, once people (whether individuals, communities, or nations) have attained a certain level of security and comfort—enough food, clothing, shelter, education, community—any increase,
however large, in wealth or possessions, appears to have no significant impact whatsoever on people’s happiness.

Studies that compare changes in the happiness of recent lottery winners with recent amputees find that, after a short time of adjustment, lottery winners soon return to whatever state of happiness they felt before winning their millions. And amputees, their bodies and hearts tender and grieving, find that their spirits rise and return to nearly the same level of happiness they felt before their amputation.

What, then, makes us happy? If, given time, survivors of tragedies and traumas report that they are about as happy as they were before, and people who win the lottery—or even those who achieve lifelong dreams—cannot claim any long-term increase in their happiness, where do we direct our attention if we hope to live happily ever after?

Here, we restate our opening premise: Happiness is an inside job. Sufficiency, contentment, are grown in the soil of moments, choice points, and listening at each juncture for the simplest, most deeply true, next right thing. It sounds so trite, so deceptively easy. But the practice of authentic happiness, as we have learned from Lincoln, is neither easy nor shallow. It is, instead, one of the more courageous, radical practices we undertake in a human life.

Listen: take a moment to put down this book. Then, unhurried and undistracted, allow your mind and heart to gently drift, settling on a moment when you recall being very happy. It may have been last week, last year, or even when you were a child. Whatever image arises, spend a few moments using your senses to recall how that moment smelled, tasted, looked, and felt. And now note the feelings in your body as you rest in the
hammock of this gently remembered moment of happiness. What do you notice?

It is not difficult to imagine that, whatever the external event or circumstance, you may have noticed certain qualities
present in you
: Perhaps you were fully paying attention, feeling what was happening in your body, willing to be surprised by something or someone you didn’t expect, more curious than frightened, not in complete control of the situation. Something was freely given and received, you felt more safe than guarded, and you were open to feelings of love and gratitude.

Each and all of these qualities are always within you, right here, this moment. When we are willing to be surprised, receptive to sensual cues in our bodies and hearts, when we are awake and attentive, not driven by fear, willing to give and receive, able to see the beauty there is and find on our lips gentle, unexpected eruptions of gratitude, we may find happiness where we never believed possible.

If we listen for the next right thing, if we recalibrate the compass of our heart’s attention away from the cravings and desires of the grasping mind and instead attend carefully and regularly to cultivating these simple practices of mercy, attention, and deep listening to who we are, what we have this moment within ourselves, we may actually find we can indeed “make our minds up” to be taken inside ourselves, to the only possible place from which we may grow genuine, deeply rooted happiness and peace wherever we are.

Seeking and Finding

W
e are all seekers. Our search for meaning, our spiritual pilgrimage, our striving for success, our pursuit of knowledge—even our pursuit of happiness—are commonly regarded as essential qualities of a rich, full life. Seeking what is over the next hill, searching for the deeper meaning of things, even our journey toward inner peace, is regarded as evidence of our more honorable nature.