We live in an environment that continually reminds us that we’re not enough—that we need to have more and be more—and it’s up to us to improve ourselves to become someone other than who we are at the moment. We’re either too fat or too skinny, too smart or too dumb, too rich or too poor, too white or too black. We’re never enough.

In current times, it’s impossible to go through a day without some advertisement or person telling us that we need to change our circumstances to reflect what a “successful” person has or does. We are inundated from all angles of media announcing that if we only would do this or that, our lives would become happy and successful.

Why have we shoved aside the idea that life is good as it is? That we don’t have to be Oprah to live a rich life? That in order to be happy, we have to be a millionaire? That in order to be beautiful, we need plastic surgery? That in order to be generous, our gifts need to be expensive and showy?

Not too long ago, I had an experience that touched me in a way few have. I was living in Boston at the time, and I was running late to meet my friend at the train station. I quickly grabbed my keys, locked my apartment, and raced toward the station, which was within walking distance. On my way, I was stopped by a minister dressed in black, holding a tin can with a sign wrapped around it that read, Help the Poor. I hesitated long enough to search my pockets for money, and it was then that I realized I’d left my wallet at home. “I’m so sorry, but I have no money,” I said to him.

Immediately, he held his can toward me. “Here, do you need any?” he offered. It was a flash of complete understanding for me of what it meant to share all you have with someone else. I can still envision every nuance of what happened that day, and I’m grateful for that experience. That small gesture of the minister’s willingness to share what he had with me was a more generous act than a million dollars from a billionaire would have been. It was not the money amount of the minister’s offer that humbled me but what it represented.

So, is it wrong to want more in life? Absolutely not. It’s okay to want and strive for more in life like all the media suggests we should do, but what I learned from my Boston experience was that in order to receive you need to be able to give … with the right perspective.

In order to be successful on your journey for creating more, it only works if you don’t negate the positive of what is already in place. For example, if I want to have more money in my life, I can’t think of the money I already have as not enough or as a lack because then I’d only create more lack. What’s stopping us from all that we want? In my mind the issue is what is being thrown at us each day from so many sources that continually tells us it is never enough. So I ask you, dear reader – when is enough, enough?

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.”
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Melody Beattie

This article originally appeared in the Autumn 2019 issue of CHOICES Magazine