The Chimera, Enough.

Restoring meaning to our lives to get out of the climate trap.

Ask yourself, is there a point in life to which you would arrive and think that you’ve done enough, a point at which you would feel like you achieved a state of perfect contentment?

It’s a curious thought.

I think most people operate with some degree of striving towards this goal. We work so that we can have the things that we need and want, which are those things that go towards attaining that goal of contentment.

And yet, for some reason, we never really get there. We may catch a feeling of contentment for few moments, but it quickly evaporates and recedes into the past, and we’re left struggling to recapture that feeling of bliss.

The question of how we can create the conditions for people to have what they need and want, to attain stability and contentment in their life, is a big one. It is, ostensibly at least, the driving force of our economy. It undergirds structures of power, which are almost always justified by those in power (or aspiring to it) with claims to doing good, to how they can benefit those whose support they need by bringing or hastening the attainment of these needs and wants.

Having enough is presented as a panacea, the ultimate goal that, once reached, solves all problems. But the more one thinks about what enough means the more unsettled the notion becomes. The goal plays with you, like a mirage or chimera, allowing you brief glimpses but, as a trick of light, as soon as you think you have something within your grasp it dances away.

There is a temporal dimension here that you may have noticed – the moment receding into the past, the displaced trickery of the mirage or the too-short experience of the glimpse. Enough is something to be strived for, sought, pursued.

Enough is a promised land never meant to be lived in, and as temporal creatures we’re caught in that trap, between wanting it, reaching for it, but never being able to attain it.

I feel like we too often forget this, and get caught up in the belief that we can have it all. When we do this we tend to rush over the process of getting there, the work involved in creating something, the effort entailed in living and the value of that. We’ve placed all our focus on “happiness” and forgotten about the “pursuit”, to borrow from the famous line in the Declaration of Independence.

Writer, psychiatrist, and survivor of Auschwitz, Viktor Frankl, in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, wrote, "To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.’”

For Frankl, while he was in the concentration camps, this was an existential issue. Having so little, even having less than nothing in some respects, where one’s life was entirely determined by the whim of another, where one had no agency whatsoever, this question of enough very much has to do with whether one has the will to continue, whether there is some thing to strive for.

The artist, Anne Truitt, when she first saw Barnett Newman’s Cathedra, said, “My whole self lifted into it. “Enough” was my radiant feeling — for once in my life enough space, enough color. It seemed to me that I had never before been free.”

The wholeness, the completeness of Newman’s Cathedra, was enough, for Truitt, but at the same time, as she recounted later, also sparked a desire in her to do more. This acted as a contrast for her – the completeness, the perfection of Cathedra and the light it shone on her own life’s work – and it shifted something within her, resulting in a belief that a sense of completeness was not what she felt towards it.

In one of the more beautiful phrases I’ve read recently, Truitt says, “I was completely taken by surprise, the more so as I had only earlier that day been thinking how I felt like a plowed field, my children all born, my life laid out; I saw myself stretched like brown earth in furrows, open to the sky, well planted, my life as a human being complete.” Truitt's contentment, the enough that she felt towards what she had till then accomplished, was challenged by Newman’s Cathedra, causing her to realize that she wanted more.

Cathedra, Barnett Newman

I think Frankl would have recognized what happened to Truitt when she saw Cathedra, the shaking loose from certainty that she experienced, and then the work that she put into her art. Frankl saw a close connection between meaning and suffering, and the challenge that acted upon Truitt is a sort of suffering, a position from which one seeks relief.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that we tend to focus on the relief and avoid the suffering. Relief is where we feel good, where effort and toil lift away to reveal reward, that sense of being free Truitt felt viewing Cathedra. But it’s worth considering what happens when this relief, this arrival at the point of enough, is disconnected from the work of getting there, from the suffering, in other words.

I’m often struck by how odd it is that we put so much into increasing productivity, increasing GDP, increasing the inexorable wringing and tightening to squeeze the utmost out of everything, while spending very little thought as to why we are doing this.

Rampant consumerism has brought us to the precipice of a climate catastrophe, yet the why remains vague, something to do with larger televisions, bigger SUVs, more more more…

It feels like this drive to always get, to always take and have is like a stripped bit that just can’t catch any longer. We want because we can’t find, because we avoid the places where meaning, the granularity of life, is embedded. These are the places where we recognize the value in suffering, the value in hardship. These are the places of learning and growth and self-actualization.

To be clear, this isn’t an endorsement of suffering for the sake of suffering. That’s just as empty as the blithe superficiality of social media influencers. It’s an appeal to establish a why, as Frankl puts it, so that we can better do the how.

Weekly News Digest - “The Blowhole”

Here are some emerging stories and events that we think will have an impact on our region that we’re keeping our eye on.

1. Local MPPs now implicated in $8.3-billion Ontario Greenbelt land grab (Simcoe.com)

2. Doug Ford’s Greenbelt damage control is the sort of nonsense that comes back to haunt politicians (Toronto Star)

3. Ontario housing minister’s chief of staff chose Greenbelt land parcels to benefit developers: auditor general (The Narwhal)

4. Natural gas can rival coal's climate-warming potential when leaks are counted (NRP)