enjoying the thing they worked so hard for. The need for of progress
can be the enemy of enjoying the process.
There is no stillness for the person who cannot appreciate things
as they are, particularly when that person has objectively done so
much. The creep of more, more, more is like a hydra. Satisfy one—
lop it off the bucket list—and two more grow in its place.
The best insights on enough come to us from the East. “When you
realize there is nothing lacking,” Lao Tzu says, “the whole world
belongs to you.” The verse in The Daodejing:
The greatest misfortune is to not know contentment.
The word calamity is the desire to acquire.
And so those who know the contentment of contentment are
always content.The Western philosophers wrestled with the balance between
getting more and being satisfied. Epicurus: “Nothing is enough for
the man to whom enough is too little.” Thomas Traherne: “To have
blessings and to prize them is to be in Heaven; to have them and not
to prize them is to be in Hell.... To prize them and not to have them
is to be in Hell.” And the Stoics who lived in the material world of an
empire at its peak knew the truth about money. Seneca had piles of it
and he knew how little it correlated with peace. His work is filled
with stories of people who drove themselves to ruin and misery
chasing money they didn’t need and honors beyond their share.
Temperance. That’s the key. Intellectually, we know this. It’s only
in flashes of insight or tragedy that we feel it.
In 2010, Marco Rubio was pacing the halls of his home, making
fund-raising calls for his surprise Senate bid, when his three-year-old
son snuck out the back door and fell into the pool. Rubio had heard
the chime of the door opening, assumed someone else was paying
attention, and returned to his important phone call. A few minutes
later, he found his son floating facedown in their pool, barely
breathing.
Even after this near tragedy he returned almost immediately to
work—his ambition, like Lincoln’s, a “little engine that knew no rest.”