Enough?

Many of us struggle with feeling happy, fulfilled, and at peace in our lives, including me. I seem to always be looking to that next sermon, book, job, or conference thinking it will be the one where I will have a breakthrough and finally hit my stride.

Anne Lamott, in her book Bird by Bird, addresses this tendency. Lamott teaches creative writing classes and her students sometimes gush about how great it must to be a published author like her. They say that if only they could get published they know they’d be happy. In reply Lamott refers to a line in Cool Runnings, a movie about the first Jamaican bobsled team. The coach the Jamaicans want is a “has been” who won a gold medal in Olympic bobsledding twenty years before, but has been a complete loser ever since. The Jamaicans on this team are desperate to win an Olympic medal because then they think they will have arrived at the mystical "happy place." But the wise coach, played by the late John Candy, sums up their condition by saying, “If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.”

That line is a keeper. If you’re not enough with your current job, you won’t be enough with a new job. If you’re not enough with the body you have now, you won’t be enough with a body that's toned, or twenty pounds lighter. If you’re not enough with the clunker you drive now, you won’t be enough with that sporty new car you’ve got your eye on (and you’ll be a lot poorer to boot!).

Happiness, contentment, fulfillment, peace, joy – whatever you want to call it, is an “inside job.” If it depends on something “out there,” even if that something is as special as Olympic gold, it will never totally satisfy and it won’t last. How about you? Are you “enough” today?