HOW MUCH SALMON WILL BE ENOUGH?

While standing at the meat counter at our local grocery store, I overheard a woman asking the butcher if there will be enough salmon in the amount she’s ordered to feed eight people for her holiday gathering.

“It depends on how much you want to serve them,” he said.

It depends.

Isn’t that the question we’re all asking ourselves, every single day, in a thousand different ways?

How much is enough?

The woman frowned, dissatisfied with his answer. She wanted certainty. A guarantee.

We live in a world that tells us whatever we have isn’t sufficient. Not enough success or recognition, never enough time, not enough money. We’ve become experts at moving the goalposts, at finding the gap between what is and what we think should be.

I watched the customer walk away, but still uncertain, and I wondered if she spent the rest of her day worrying about whether her guests would leave hungry. Whether they’d judge her cooking or hospitality. When the truth is, they’d probably just be grateful to be fed and welcomed into her home for the holidays.

We do this all the time. We continually ask if what we have is enough, already convinced that the answer is no or not yet. We forget that ‘enough’ isn’t a fixed point somewhere out there, waiting to be reached. It’s a choice we make, a perspective we adopt, a grace we grant ourselves.

The dissatisfaction of feeling like we don’t have enough robs us of the present while promising us a better future. It tells us that once we have enough – enough money, enough success, enough of whatever we’re chasing, then we’ll be able to relax. Then we’ll be happy.

What felt abundant yesterday feels barely adequate today. But ‘enough’, as it turns out, depends on how we choose to see the world.

The real question then isn’t whether we have enough. It’ whether we’re able to recognize what is enough when it’s right in front of us, already laid out on our plates, in our ordinary, imperfect, perfectly sufficient lives.

John V. Clark, President/Partner
The James Company
Phone: (815) 353-8997
Email: jclark@jamescompany.com