Being Enough

 Hey team, today I’d like to write about self worth the feeling like you are enough.

This is to show others that they are all worthy of unconditional love and have value beyond all labels and achievements. This is also for me, as I am a human, living in a human society, with a human ego which episodically fools me into feelings of “not enough”. 

I know in my heart, not my mind/ brain, that I, like everyone else on this planet, am worthy of unconditional love and have unconditional value. I’m not just somebody, I’m somebody special, just as you are. However, I live life with a human mind which serves to discriminate between “this” and “ that”, “good” and “bad”, “self” and “other” and more of course. And for better or for worse, this discriminatory mind serves to guide my life through a lens of familiar “comfort”. This comfort is not the soft memory foam of the perfect mattress or the light humor of chatting with my close friends. It’s the default perspective (story I live my life through) of what I know through my experience of growing up and being formed by the world around me. A world of conditional value/ love, of “merit” based living, of “cool points”,  “sexy points” and “opportunities, jobs, internships, scholarships, leadership, followers and even ‘normal people’ points”. I fall victim to seeing the material world around me, the ways others standardized achievement and the way my ego is no different and I suffer. I feel the heaviness of shame and disgust reminding me that “lollygagging in the land of feelings and oneness is just an escapism from failing to make something of yourself in the ‘real’ world”.

But with my wise mind I sit here challenging that belief, just as I would if others expressed that as their truth. There is no one way to live, one way to hold yourself, one way to realize the infinite value that you innately have. The problem with this discriminatory part of mind is that it indirectly quantifies everything when ultimately life cannot be quantified. Yes from a gross standpoint we can say someone has a networth of a million dollars, is 6 feet tall and has a 4.0 GPA but what does that have to do with happiness, with peace, with love and contentment? I think nothing. If these gross, quantifiable, measures are markers of success, why are they all conditional? If something is quantifiable, an object of discrimination (eg “this” and “that”), it is inherently conditional. For example, if someone works a coveted job, that is the object of envy, the job serves as the outcome and outcomes are nothing but conditional upon a complex arrangement of variables starting from potential family wealth and opportunities, genes that could program a brain to be capable of learning, and an education to shape said brain in the right way to perform specific duties. And even if the job holder in question checked all those boxes, the outcome is also in complex psychological/ societal interplay which hypothetically could be quantified but is far too intricate to do so. The outcome is discreet, conditional and quantifiable, but that is far separate from the inherent and non quantifiable value. 

We do not control outcomes. I feel, which I have good reason to believe, that we live in a world that by and large) values you based off of the outcomes you have “checked off”. But what did I just say, we do not control outcomes. I’ll paint a clear picture that I live through every exam week. I take notes before class, reviewing content before it's discussed during lecture, perhaps even going even further and watching recorded lectures I’m able to find online. I engage with the material during class, answering questions the professor will ask to the class and asking some of my own to clarify any lapses. And after the lecture I’ll go on to utilize case based questions from textbooks to actively engage my knowledge. I’ll do all this and still not get a perfect score even if I did all the actions necessary to cultivate an A. What gives? We don’t control outcomes, there is no switch we can flick (metaphorically) that will allow one to get the outcomes of their desires. Outcomes, in any sense (grades, job, scholarship, relationships, ect) are not actions we can directly take. An outcome by its nature is a noun, a place we get to. We control actions. We control whether we study or not, how we study, and how often we study and for how long. We control what we eat and take in, how we take care of ourselves and prioritize our well-being, but we don’t control our sense of well being, the state of being well. It deeply saddens me when I see others in my life who get so bogged down by not getting a grade they wanted and push away any sense of contentment in knowing they did all they could (actions). In a previous post discussing the Buddhist concept presented to me by Thich Nhat Hanh, I talked about being the gardener of your seeds. We can water our seeds and take good care of them with our mindful actions, but we cannot make them blossom. Of course in nurturing our seeds we are increasing the odds of having a healthy seed blossom, but we can never blossom the seed directly. 

So in writing about the falseness of outcomes and the pain we set up for ourselves if we attach to them, what am I changing? Nothing obviously, the world is as it is and I am merely one voice speaking the truth on the nature of it all. Not my truth, I didn’t make this up, it just is. My intention is to emphasize the value and love we have and our worthy of beyond all outcomes and conditions. We must see and believe that all we can do is try with thoughtful actions and hopefully through trying, we are able to selflessly help others while indirectly serving ourselves in the process. We must live as our authentic selves, as seeds only grow from honest hands. If being enough is conditional, it will always be false, because if it's not this condition that we will overcome, it's the next condition and so on in a never ending cycle of suffering. Anything that is conditional is separate from the object of value and love. Let us know of our unconditional value and detach from the things we cannot control while accepting the things we can (actions).