Enough

I have spent a surprising amount of time lately wondering whether I am dissatisfied.

That sentence is almost as ridiculous as it sounds.

The question arose because I had been reading Buddhist descriptions of dukkha—usually translated into English as suffering, dissatisfaction, or unsatisfactoriness—and began wondering how much of it remained in me.

There are things in my life I would prefer to be different.

Relationships that did not turn out as I might have chosen.

Family relationships that fractured and never healed.

Work I would rather not still be doing at this stage of my life.

Things I hoped would happen that didn’t.

Things I wish had gone somewhere that went nowhere at all.

So yes, I thought.

There is dissatisfaction here.

And because I have spent the last several years investigating consciousness with the enthusiasm of a dog that has discovered an unattended garbage bag, I did what I always do.

I started digging.

What I found surprised me.

Because when I actually went looking for the dissatisfaction, most of the time it wasn’t there.

I could find the circumstances.

I could find the preferences.

I could find memories.

But I couldn’t find some continuous background state of dissatisfaction accompanying them.

My father doesn’t want contact with me.

I wish that were different.

If I deliberately bring it into awareness, there is sadness there. A little ache.

But I don’t carry it around all day.

I don’t think about it while mowing the lawn.

I don’t wake up thinking about it.

It isn’t sitting somewhere in the background whispering that my life cannot be okay until this situation changes.

It arises when the circumstances that evoke it arise.

Then it disappears.

The same seemed to be true of many other things I had been calling dissatisfaction.

And gradually I realized I had been lumping several very different processes together.

There is a signal:

I don’t like this.

There is a response:

Can I do something about it?

And then there is something else entirely:

Entanglement.

This shouldn’t be happening.

This has to change.

Why does this always happen to me?

I cannot be okay until reality becomes different from what it presently is.

That third thing is not the same as the first two.

A signal can be useful.

Pain tells me something is wrong.

Frustration tells me a strategy isn’t working.

Anger can tell me a boundary has been crossed.

Dissatisfaction can tell me that some aspect of my life might be improved.

And then I can respond.

I can buy better tools.

Change suppliers.

Structure my work differently.

Stop climbing ladders I have no business climbing.

Have the difficult conversation.

Accept the relationship that cannot presently be repaired.

Change what can be changed.

Leave alone what cannot.

None of that requires me to suffer continuously because reality failed to consult me before arranging itself.

And then someone asked me a question I hadn’t thought to ask.

Instead of asking what I was dissatisfied with:

When am I satisfied?

That stopped me.

Because I realized I almost never think about being satisfied.

Dissatisfaction announces itself.

It pounds on the door.

It files a complaint.

It demands attention.

Contentment does none of those things.

Contentment is quiet.

And because it asks for nothing, it can become almost invisible.

So I started looking.

What are the high points of my days?

Twenty minutes lying in the sun with my eyes closed.

Watching my dog run around the yard simply because he is delighted to be alive.

Sitting with my miniature horses while they nuzzle against me and conduct a detailed investigation of the zippers on my clothing.

Walking through the woods.

A hummingbird appearing unexpectedly.

A strange fuzzy moth landing nearby.

A particularly magnificent dragonfly.

Finishing a difficult job and knowing I did it well.

Solving a problem.

Reading.

Playing a game.

Doing yard work.

Lying beside my dog in the sunshine.

None of these things accomplish anything.

They don’t advance my career.

They don’t increase my bank balance.

They don’t resolve my relationships.

They don’t answer my questions about consciousness.

They don’t tell me what reality ultimately is.

They don’t make me important.

They don’t lead anywhere.

And that is precisely the point.

They are enough.

I began wondering whether this was what I had mistaken for a loss of drive.

There was a time when motivation seemed much more closely connected to deficiency.

Something needed to happen.

Something needed to change.

Something needed to be acquired, solved, achieved, understood, fixed.

There was always somewhere else to get to.

That machinery has become very quiet.

But strangely, I haven’t stopped doing things.

My business is growing.

I write.

I conduct experiments.

I solve problems.

I make plans.

I improve things.

I take care of the animals.

I work.

I play.

Life continues moving.

What seems to have diminished is not intention.

It is the feeling that something must happen before the present can be sufficient.

There is an enormous difference between:

I would prefer this

and

I need this in order to be okay.

I still have preferences.

Plenty of them.

If I could design reality from scratch, this isn’t remotely the one I would design.

I wouldn’t create a world where living creatures have to consume other living things merely to remain alive.

Human beings would behave differently.

Society would look nothing like this.

There probably isn’t even a useful comparison between the reality I would design and the one I find myself inhabiting.

But this is the one that exists.

Reality supplied B when I might have chosen A.

And eventually B simply became the life being lived.

For much of my life, I learned to manage expectations.

That was probably protective.

Perhaps sometimes too protective.

If you expect less, disappointment has less distance to fall.

And I can now see that lowered expectations may occasionally have affected what I pursued and therefore what became possible.

But something has changed there too.

I don’t think my expectations are lowered anymore.

I think they are loosened.

There are things I would very much like.

I would love for my consciousness research to connect with serious researchers.

I would love for some of the strange data I have collected to contain something genuinely useful.

I would love to work alongside people with better equipment and deeper expertise and discover whether any of these observations point somewhere important.

I would love for my writing to reach people and help them.

I can pursue those things seriously.

I can work toward them.

I can hope for them.

I just don’t need to hold my present life hostage until they happen.

Maybe that is the balance I was missing.

High aspiration. Loose expectations.

I can genuinely pursue A while knowing that B is enough.

And then there is death.

I spent much of my earlier life afraid of it.

I am not anymore.

That doesn’t mean I want to die.

Quite the opposite.

There is so much here that I enjoy.

I want more mornings.

More dogs.

More horses.

More sunshine.

More strange bugs.

More experiments.

More laughter.

More walks through the woods at night when the coyotes start calling and the flashlight unexpectedly dies.

But if the door closed tomorrow, I don’t feel that there is some enormous list of things that must happen first.

No great bucket list.

No brass ring.

No final accomplishment required to certify that this life counted.

I would prefer tomorrow.

I simply don’t require tomorrow as payment for being okay today.

And strangely, all of this circles back to something that happened four years ago.

During a near-death experience, amid something far stranger and more consequential than anything I had expected life to contain, one of the first realizations that came to me was about the little things.

The little things had sustained me.

Not the accomplishments.

Not the grand events.

The little things.

Much later came experiences I could never have anticipated.

Extraordinary states of consciousness.

Periods of exquisite ecstasy.

Periods of equally exquisite pain.

Insights that changed how I understand myself.

Changes so profound that the person I used to be sometimes feels almost like somebody I remember rather than somebody I was.

My life did not become A.

It did not become B.

Reality threw the fucking deck in the air.

And somehow, after all of that, I arrived back at the same place.

The little things.

Imagine that tomorrow everything I hope for with my work suddenly happens.

Researchers call.

They look seriously at the data.

Experiments are replicated.

We work together.

Something useful is discovered.

People listen.

The books reach thousands of people.

Something I observed in this strange little laboratory of a life contributes, however modestly, to our understanding of consciousness.

I would be thrilled.

Give me the laboratory.

Give me the researchers.

Give me the equipment.

Give me the data.

Give me the discovery I have spent years wondering whether anyone would notice.

I’ll gladly take all of it.

And then, at the end of the day,

give me twenty minutes in the sun beside my dog.

I know which one will make me content.

It’s the little things.

It was always the little things.

And they were always enough.

-Elias