A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough Read Online Free PDF Page B

friend come over and play. Soon the parents are upset, even angry, because the children are being uncooperative, foiling their well-intentioned, loving plans for sharing a beautiful, happy day together at the park.
    In the end, the parents likely feel weary, defeated, and unappreciated, given all the time and careful planning that they had put in to making this gift happen. Clearly, the parents logically conclude, no matter what I try and do for my children, it is never enough.
    But what if this has nothing at all to do with enough of anything? Here, it was efficiency that won the day, forcing love into a subordinate position. What if the next, right thing would have been to abandon all plans for the park, allow the children some gentle family time at home with books and friends, perhaps some hot chocolate, a fire, a game of cards after dinner? Where, then, are our feelings of doing everything and never feeling it is enough?
    More importantly, where are our feelings of love, care, and passion for our children and our lives? When we bargain our lives away to a series of endless plans and practicalities, when we sacrifice our heart’s desire, over and over, on the altar of efficiency, we slowly erode our essential, sensual, wise, intuitive soul’s natural trust in itself.
    Following the thread, listening for the next right thing—these may seem insignificant, but they are no small things. They dramatically shift the way we see, the way we choose,and the way we live. They determine whether we live a life oppressed, overwhelmed, and scarce—or spacious, honest, and fully sufficient. When we curtail our tendency to follow habitual patterns of efficiency and instead choose love as our deepest intention, it allows us to reclaim our passion, our vitality, our fierce integrity. As one dear friend confessed, “I feel like I am finally living not as a reaction to external pressure and coercion but from within my own heart, my own body, from inside my own skin.”
    GERALD MAY, FROM THE AWAKENED HEART :
    The natural human spirit is irrepressibly radical; it wants the unattainable, yearns for the impractical, is willing to risk the improper. But as we conform ourselves to the practicalities and proprieties of efficiency, we restrict the space between desire and control; we confine our intention to an ever-decreasing range of possibilities. The choices we make—and therefore the way we feel about ourselves—are determined less by what we long for and more by what is controllable and acceptable to the world around us. After enough of this, we lose our passion. We forget who we are.
    When we listen for, and surrender to, the simple clarity of the next right thing—liberated from the inevitability of previous plans or declarations—we are likely to find that the next moment brings with it a sense of easy sufficiency. By feeling our way along this path, moving carefully into the absolutely perfectly next right thing, we are more likely to do less, move more slowly, and come upon some completely unexpected meadow of spacious, gentle time and care that feels remarkably, for now, like enough.
    It may be useful to set aside some time for quiet reflection on your own heart’s deepest motivation, to listen for the most sacred or essential why of your life. It may be something you have known and carried your whole life. It may have changed, or be evolving in some new direction in this very moment. If we can know with confidence and trust the source of love, the unshakable veracity of why we live and work and struggle and give, and remember always what we are living for, the choices we face each day regarding how we will choose and act and move will become vastly less complex and more simple. Day by day, your choices, because they are more accurate, honest, and true, may feel increasingly obvious and may open within you a slowly emerging spaciousness and sufficiency.

A Thread of Truth
    When I was with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, I