Enough

From Heather Havrilesky, What If This Were Enough?”

“From the day we are born, the world tells us lies about who we are, how we should live, and what we should sacrifice to cross some imaginary finish line to success and happiness.”

And that is just her opening line in the introduction.  She continues:

“More than anything we have to imagine a different kind of life, a different way of living.  We have to reject the shiny, shallow future that will never come, and locate ourselves in the current, flawed moment.  Despite what we’ve been taught, we are neither eternally blessed nor eternally damned.  We are blessed and damned and everything in between.  Instead of toggling between victory and defeat, we have to learn to life in the middle, in the gray area, where a real life can unfold on its own time.  We have to breathe in reality instead of distracting ourselves around the clock.  We have to open our eyes and our hearts to each other.  We have to connect with what already is, who we already are, and what we already have.

We want too much.  We don’t need that much to be happy.  We can change ourselves…by returning to that simple truth repeatedly.  We have to imagine finally feeling satisfied.”

Well, that’s a lot to do in the next 220 pages!