Enough

The antidote to madness

In the tail-end of that period which shall not be named, five years ago, in the lengthening evenings of spring; it was possible to take long walks in the abandoned country for as long as you liked because there wasn’t really anything left to do. Long trails to no-where, (Or to nearby hamlets that barely register on the map,) trails which themselves trailed off into pleasant obscurity.

Near home there is an aqueduct and under that aqueduct there is this strange, hobbit-like tunnel. It is just slightly too small to stand in and sometimes canal water drips from the ceiling. Dank though it may be—and befitting of trolls—there is a certain glee in passing through it, like finding a tiny cave to explore.

I remember taking my shoes off in a forest clearing and just sitting there for hours. A stream trickles by, the birds tweet. Ironically, this hidden place is within about 200m of the railway line, so there would also be the occasional interruption; but that, if anything, elevated the hiddenness of the place. I found it amusing to think that there was a train containing people unaware that I was sitting here right under their noses. It was one of those small thoughts about the bigness of the world that adults aren’t supposed to have. I even did a cartwheel or two, to prove the point.

You see, what was peculiar about that time, which has been made difficult to discuss because of the very serious class disparity implicit in the idea, (the same period was deeply traumatic for a lot of people, not to be discounted,) is that it was possible for quite a large number of people to taste the unmediated reality which has been sitting under our noses the whole time. The reality obscured by assorted demiurges of work-life, of education, of the mass-entertainment monoculture, of the egregoric digital pluri-culture and so on. A life freed from growth.

Once the initial shock of the emergency had subsided, and once those non-key-working people who were able to settle into a rhythm did so, many people ended up with simpler responsibilities than anyone below the age of 65 has known since the advent of the telegraph.

You could have enough, do enough, and live with a large surplus of time and mental energy, in large part because you were actively being told to not do too much!

Enough, as in sufficient, as in not needing any more.

Of course, to get to that point there was a great deal of getting bored we had to do: Getting bored of day-drinking in pyjamas as the government scientists tried to explain virology with football metaphors, of TV in general, of video-games, of social-media. Of board-games and books. Of home yoga and meditation even.

Only once the boredom was absolute, irrepressible, utterly utterly abject; only then, when forced, did the world reveal herself to us. She’s still there, waiting for us to notice her again.

The experience of Enough is revelatory because it short-circuits everything you were indoctrinated with at school. It literally takes you back to the state of being a four-year-old again. The expectations and rules that you had taken as given, as necessary to get by in a world defined by arbitrary competition and status-seeking behaviour melt away. Like taking psychedelics but without any of the risks.

From the vantage of Enough, the whole game tends to look daft. Indeed, it rather looks like madness. The pursuit of infinite growth, of speculation, of the whole game that the world seems to be playing. Mad in the purest sense, as in ‘Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result’.

With it washes away much of the compulsion to habitual soothing (read: addictive cycles) and much of the desire to do anything which does not fit the following schema:

Good reasons to do stuff:

• For the prevention of bad consequences;

• For the creation of the conditions for good things to happen;

• For Enjoyment

Alignment; coherence; clarity—tantalisingly within reach!

…And then the world went back to normal again.

Worse, we’ve gone into a radical overdrive in the other direction. Everything is a casino now, the president of the United States is using an unjustified war in the Middle East as a vehicle to manipulate his son’s oil futures (look it up!). The madness of speculation, of Never Enough, has infected everything, its everywhere. Almost like a spectre of the unresolved feelings that people still have about That Time.

The megalomania of the cancer cell, the narcissism of the black hole, the bank accounts of the worst people in the world.

Indeed, in such an environment, it is hard to cling on to a realistic understanding of Enough. Not least because the acceleration has made everything more expensive. Because everything is more expensive, more people are frantically clamouring for your limited attention, trying to shout over one another, lying to sell you things.

The struggle is very much real, and not entirely tractable for most of us. That said, you can at least, in a limited way, assert your freedom.

The matter at the heart of the madness of the times is time itself. Specifically, the idea that there isn’t enough of it. Enough of it for what? People come up with all sorts of answers, but I want to suggest that while there may not be enough time for this or that thing in a single lifetime, there is always enough time to live in the moment.

Such is the power of doing nothing and fucking off.