enough
some existential, philosophical thoughts about why you--yes YOU--matter and why you need to be a whole lot nicer to yourself IMMEDIATELY
Dear Kindreds,
A thing has happened that has happened to me before.
It’s about “enoughness.”
I’ve been learning a lot about enoughness. About how I am enough, and you are enough, and about how what that really means is that this moment in time and space, and how the endlessly complex state of the entire Universe at this point in its explosion (btw, isn’t it so wild that we are fragments of combustion created by a thing blowing up called The Universe that started 13 billions of years ago?) is also “enough.” Because all of it, altogether, is a whole. And how can something that is a perfect part of a perfect whole be anything but precisely enough?
How this translates to real life is that all that’s inside our heads is enough, and all (and I mean all) that is outside our heads is also enough. All thoughts. All actions. All things. And most especially, all consciousnesses (like you and me). And all of it is all enough together, as one giant tableaux, as one tiny snapshot in a progression of stuff expanding and winding and intertwining and “exploding”—a progression that is billions of years old.
I know this sounds weird, but hang with me a minute and let’s see if I can explain it better.
Think of a fetus “exploding” into being from the combustion of two microscopic cells commingling. Think of the part right there at the beginning. How there is nothing but two tiny fragments of matter, and then suddenly in the stillness of the womb, something happens. A progression—an explosion, if you will— begins and then something starts growing.
Say you slow down the time of that process significantly, so that you could freeze-frame just one millisecond or micro-millisecond of that process—part of the explosion from two cells to zygote, perhaps—a process that is self-propelled and a fractal of the larger explosion of the Universe, of course. Say you froze the frame in the middle of, oh, I don’t know, day three of that process and examined the atomic structure of the something that is growing.
Millions of atoms are frozen in time and space and can be evaluated, suddenly, not by their part in the process, but by their apparent relation to what is a false whole—the photograph that contains their likeness. There they are in the freeze frame, these atoms, caught in the act of shifting and writhing and collecting. Layers and layers of atoms comprising—a multiplicity of atoms just being, just doing their job of existing as part of the duplicating cells which are, one system higher, being the being that is coming into being.
Now say that I, analyst extraordinaire, took one of those snapshots and tried to pinpoint anywhere within this growing, expanding conglomerate of atoms-in-motion that is frozen in this still-frame just where there is something lacking. Let’s say I pointed to what to me, in that snapshot, looks like a hole, or an unfilled space. I notice quite a gap between the electrons of this particular atom. Shouldn’t they be more even? Wouldn’t it be better if there was more uniformity here? More structural integrity? Or let’s say I point out what I see as an errata on the larger structure—a pucker on one of the newly formed cells.
I notice that this cell has a strange pucker that is unnecessary and makes it look different than the other cells around it. Shouldn’t we make that more uniform? Or let’s say I hold the photo even farther from my eyes to see the image as a “whole.”
This grouping of atoms into cells is supposed to eventually become something so important, yet as I look at the whole structure, I must say, this zygote-to-be is looking pretty awkward—very unkempt and uneven and even a bit gauche, if I may be frank. Maybe we should iron it out a little bit, make it more comely, more fitting of the zygote—nay, the human being!—it is becoming.
Yet every one of those observations made by my human brain would be woefully mistaken. Really that space between electrons is incidental, and the varied distances between cells inconsequential. Really that pucker of the cell in question happens to be its first step of mitosis. Really what appears to be misshapenness is an organic process of movement, not a finished product of any kind. These are objects in motion. This planet is an object in motion, and everything it is made up of, on both microscopic and quantum levels, are also objects in motion.
So much of what we see as “wrong” when we slow things down to a freeze-frame is completely misunderstood by these reality-chopping brains of ours, and their unfortunate penchant for symmetry, uniformity, and controlled chaos. But in most cases, it’s not “wrong” at all. It’s a perfectly whole, perfectly adequate, perfectly essential, part of a larger whole, a lengthier process, a more holistic, more complete perfection that our brains, trained as they are to break reality down into bite-sized, digestible fractions, cannot ascertain.
We are wrong, friends. Almost any time our brain tries to tell us a defined quantity, and especially a defined quality, we are wrong.
I see this happen to people in the therapy office all the time. A classic example would be someone wanting to start a new exercise regimen, hitting it hard for five days, then giving the whole thing up on day six when they forget to go and have broken the “perfection” of their effort. “If you can’t do it right, why do it all?” the human says, viewing as “right” all things that are glistening and orderly and sequential and uniform and pretty and all things that are dull or chaotic or non-sequential or deviating as “wrong.” As if we could even comprehend what order looks like without the “contrast” of disorder to compare it to—both being, of course, two sides of one coin.
Most living processes are a heavy mixture of chaos and order. Of bumpiness and smoothness. Of brightness and darkness. Of day and night. Of yin and yang. Of days going to the gym and days forgetting to go to the gym. Of months of sobriety becoming years of sobriety and the reality that those two relapses during those 15 years of mostly-sober don’t reduce the total of 15 years one iota—or shouldn’t and wouldn’t if our brains were a tad less pedantic. It is all cycles and seasons and summers and winters and bulbous circles of wood becoming flat tables and round orbs becoming planed horizons from just the right angle. It’s cycles being just enough but with a bit of extra, a remainder—or a seeming remainder—the way the Sumerians tried so hard to measure time successfully against the Earth’s orbit by using a base of 60, and counting years as “6” which totals 360 and which is where we get our calendar year— almost perfectly fitting the roundness of the orbit save those pesky extra five days needed to ensure that years remain aligned to seasons over millennia.
All of this is true of us, my friends.
Enoughness is knowing that we cannot ever be measured as still-frames because we are a full-ass process. We ourselves are a becoming. We ourselves are collections of fractals in motion. We ourselves are parts of other fractals in motion. In no instant are we not both shedding the literal cells of yesterday and breathing in the oxygen that will nourish the cells—of which there are trillions in our bodies—of tomorrow.
To look at that complex, beautiful, process-in-motion, take a snap shot, and say “this life-conglomerate is failing because it did not successfully clean its dishes in the sink” is such folly. It is madness, really.
“Hey you big glob of matter in space and time? Don’t you realize you would have been a perfect process in motion today if only you had successfully removed the matter off of these other white chunks of matter? But you didn’t, so you are now NOT ENOUGH…”
Can you see how fucking INSANE we are with ourselves?
This is why “trust in the process” is useful.
This is why “believing in something beyond ourselves” is utilitarian as much as it is “faithful.”
This is why accepting many, many, many of the things our brain concludes as “wrong” as actually, instead, a beautiful part of the “enough” of something grander that we can’t just see quite yet ends up being an act of healing—a sacrament; a path to congruence between our insides and all that exists outside of us.
We are in motion. We are whole because we are a process. We are not an event strapped to one fragment of space-time, to be forever gawked at and compared to other fragments of space-time, or to the whole of the process; we are the process.
We don’t function. We are a function.
We don’t grow. We are growth.
We don’t become. We be.
We aren’t getting there. We are here.
We aren’t flawed creatures trying to improve. We are flower buds watching our perfect petals unfurl before us in exact cosmic order.
It is for this reason that scientists keep coming to the conclusion that we have no free will.
Because, of course we do. But also, of course we do not, cannot, couldn’t possibly account for all the ways billions of years have presaged, pre-paved, pre-conditioned every choice, every sequence of events into the exact formulae that have already occurred because time is a construct, and all that will be somehow already is.
Can you see it?
Can you see how you can’t ever see yourself from the grander more cosmic perspective of the perfect and inevitable unfolding of the Universe-as-whole?
And can you see how that means, without question, that you genuinely and truly are enough?
We were always going to do exactly what we did do, and it hasn’t happened but yes it has, and time doesn’t actually exist it’s just a weird dribbling of what-already-is into percieved isness, and somewhere in that dribbling, we have the ability to both choose as well as know that what we have chosen was always going to be what we chose from the dawn of time, cuz it already happened, and it’s all perfect, and YOU, beautiful process, are PART of that perfection! You are! Always!
You always get to do anything you do from the place of knowing that you have nothing to earn or to prove.
All you have are the petals of your perfect flower of self to unfurl, and all you have to do is watch that process happen and delight in it, thanking the heavens that you are a consciousness able to watch an infinitesimally minute fraction of this breathtaking process.
The zygote, as it were, is an atom and a cell and a zygote and an embryo and a grown child and an old woman and decrepitude rotting in a tomb on this spinning rock (process) in this spinning solar system (process) as part of a spinning galaxy (process) all at once right now forever and ever and ever worlds without fucking end.
And it is you. You are all of that. Already. And you get to watch and experience your you-ness right now, right here, in this moment, as you read these words! What bounty! What a coup! What a goddam miracle it is that you are reading these words with your eyeballs (process) and interpret them with your mind (process) so you can understand a sentence (process) about how you relate to all that is and ever was and ever will be (a process).
And, after all of that, you question your value in this Universe?
Silly, my friend. Silly.
You are the fucking Universe.