The Grace of Enough

Sometimes, what we can’t afford makes room for what matters most.

.   .   .

Even in humble circumstances, there are often mixed blessings and hidden benefits.

I’ve always preferred a simpler, more minimalist way of living. Money would go toward a guitar before a car. After a recent move, things didn’t go entirely as planned, and I had to sell off a lot of my studio buddies. Chalk it up to transitions and changes. They’d served their purpose.

I lived in a small carriage house for five years, which I found on Craigslist in late 2010 while visiting Wales. I rented it sight unseen, and it worked out well enough. I sometimes resented it, but I usually spent my time away from home anyway — walking, hiking, taking photos, listening to audiobooks, or settling into one of a few favorite cafes nearby to ponder, read, and write. My recent move was another leap of faith as I headed toward the west coast of BC to try out island living.

The car has generally been reliable, if a little beat up, with a good stereo for listening to and singing along with my songs. An aging iMac sits in my studio. A couple of hardware upgrades over the years, along with open-source software patches for operating system updates, have kept it useful for music production, photography, video editing, and streaming entertainment. I’ve also let go of a few redundant devices.

When it comes to food, I tend to stick to simple meals that are ready in minutes, built around single ingredients and usually animal-based. I’ve tried strict vegetarian and even vegan diets, but they didn’t work for me. Somewhere along the line, I started thanking the animals for their sacrifice, asking that any ill-treatment they may have suffered not become part of me, and that they rest peacefully and free.

The blessing of a limited budget is that I’m less able to buy the junk food I might once have enjoyed. Better habits have taken root as I spend less and less time wandering those grocery-store aisles.

If I had a budget for alcohol and extra desserts, I might use it up. If I took out a car loan, I’d be making payments. Going forward, fuel for the car matters because it allows me to explore; a mortgage might enter the picture if I find a suitable home base; and, of course, it would be fun to travel abroad. But right in my own backyard, wherever I may land, are countless wonders to explore. Walking, as we know, offers a deliberate, observant pace.

We buy into a lot of lies, and we tend to buy a lot of useless filler crap. It’s a marketing fiction that everyone needs their own everything. We’ve made multimillionaires of self-storage providers by paying to store our dust-collecting excess year after year, even as it sits unused and forgotten.

Much of what we think we can’t afford is stuff we don’t need in the first place. Skip the commercials and ignore the magazines, newspapers, and social media feeds if they only leave you feeling as though there’s never enough. Remember how short-lived the excitement was when you bought that new thing? You fell for it. Again.

Most of the excitement and novelty in life lies in the work and the journey toward something, not in having and achieving, acquiring and arriving. Isn’t that interesting? Life is always moving, perpetually changing. Stagnation is impossible, and boredom is an unimaginative folly, even if it serves an important purpose.

We are happiest in motion: always learning, challenging ourselves, building and making, facing obstacles by design — or those that seem to show up because we idled too long. Even the most practiced meditator needs the next errant thought to observe, let pass, and release without attachment. The “void” is hugely powerful: that ephemeral space in between. Just as in music, it must exist for the notes to sing out and have substance or meaning.

Question your perspective. Perhaps what seems to be missing simply allows more light to fall on what is here — and what truly matters.

Satis est