Why Is This Not Enough?

I’m working on my secular Buddhist practice, working on being more curious about my own emotions, the emotions of others, and creating a bit of separation between the thing that is happening inside of me or outside of me, and my sense that *I* am somehow that thing. This pause is interesting. Sometimes it can be annoying. But it is almost always useful as a way of seeing the world (and yourself) more clearly and reacting with more conscious thought.

A friend of mine has worked as a professional mediator and his wife told him after he was licensed that she didn’t want him to use that stuff on her. I suspect it made her feel like he saw her as a project more than a person and/or that it made him seem superior to her, above the emotions that were the normal part of a relationship. Being human means having messy feelings and it also means that pausing can make you seem less involved in the work of being human. But if you have problems with severe anxiety, which I sometimes do, or with suicidal ideation, which I sometimes have, a bit of distance between yourself and the thought “I don’t want to be alive anymore” can prevent a tragedy.

This week, as I was driving to an appointment to get my hearing aids refurbished (they had stopped working), I had a long day planned out after the appointment and traffic was making me late. I got to the appointment and still had to wait thirty minutes for it to begin, and then another twenty minutes for my hearing aids to be ready to wear again. As I drove home, later than I’d planned, I found myself becoming anxious about being late for the dinner with my family that I was supposed to be in charge of. And I told myself that I was being stupid. OK, fine, I’m trying to tell myself I’m stupid less, but that is what came out in the moment, and then I tried to ask myself what other thoughts I might have. Hurrying home wouldn’t help the situation. Nor was stewing about it.

So I asked myself instead, “Why is this not enough?” I asked myself why I wasn’t perfectly happy driving home in my car that I bought nearly new last year so that I didn’t worry about it anymore, with enough money to pay for gas and registration and any minor repairs it needed, enough food in my stomach to not be hungry, with a cell phone to guide me and an audiobook to entertain me along the way. Surely what was actually happening in my life was, in fact, a pleasant experience. So long as I stopped being impatient, worrying about problems for future me, and accepting that things would likely work out fine.

I’ve spent most of my life telling myself that if I did MORE and did it FASTER, then somehow that would make me worthy of love and that it would produce happiness. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been true very often. So maybe it isn’t ME that is the broken part. Maybe it’s the pushing and demanding more of myself. So I tried to let go of the demand and simply enjoy the audiobook and stop thinking about being “late.” I’m not going to pretend that the anxiety went away completely, but it did, in fact, dissipate to a degree. And everything was, in fact, fine.