The Grace of Enough

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

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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 transition and change. They’d served their purpose.

I lived in a small carriage house for five years, which I found on Craigslist while visiting Wales. I rented it sight unseen, and it worked out well enough. I usually spend my time away from home: walking, hiking, taking photos, listening to audiobooks, or settling into a favorite nearby cafe to ponder, read, and write. My recent move was another leap of faith, heading toward the west coast of BC to try island living.

The cars I’ve owned have generally been reliable, if a little beat up, with a good stereo for listening to and singing along with my songs. An old computer sits in my studio. Hardware upgrades and software patches over the years have kept it useful for music production, photography, video editing, and watching shows or films. I’ve often let go of redundant devices.

For food, I prefer simple meals that are ready in minutes, built around single ingredients.

The blessing of a limited budget is that I’m less able to buy junk, whether food or otherwise. Better habits have taken root now that I spend little to no time mindlessly wandering store aisles.

It would be fun to travel abroad more often. But right in my own backyard, wherever I land, are countless wonders to explore. Walking, moving at a deliberate pace, gives us the time and opportunity to really take it all in.

We buy into a lot of lies and fill our lives with useless stuff. 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 really need in the first place. Skip the commercials and ignore the magazines, newspapers, and social media feeds if they leave you feeling as though there’s never enough. Remember how short-lived the excitement was when you bought that new thing?

Much of life’s genuine anticipation and novelty is found 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’ve dithered too long.

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