Post #155: Not Good Enough

31 Oct. 2024

     Whether looking at ourselves or at our world (and the two may be less distinct than we think), surely we all know the feeling: this is just not good enough. The Buddhists would tell us that such sentiments are woven into the very fabric of sentient existence, one of the ways in which Dukkha makes itself felt to us, which makes it all look like something to be overcome. On the other hand, without some such sense of dissatisfaction, what would impel us to grow and develop? A Buddha may be beyond it, but Buddhas have arrived, when we are still on the way.

     “Not good enough” comes with many pitfalls, needless to say. Perfectionism, its extreme expression, is a curse, because by its exacting standards nothing will ever do. Thus it has been said with much cause that the best is the enemy of the good. Make yourself comfortable with less, or you will never have a tranquil moment in your life, and it will be a ceaseless, miserable chase after an elusive holy grail or golden fleece. Outwardly it may look very successful—the mercilessly driven type is easy to find “at the top of the world”—but on the inside it will look very different. A dangerous temptation, this mirage of outward success, especially in our age where the chimeras of celebrity glory are flashed at us without cease.

     The life of our young man Siddhartha, before he became the Buddha, is a case in point. He was raised, it is said, with every comfort and convenience imaginable in his day, by a father who wanted to shield him from the evils of the world. But it was not good enough. The life of a prince, with a lovely young wife and a delightful newborn, might have sufficed for a lesser man; but Siddhartha called them “fetters” and walked out. (All this may sound a little stylized and archetypal, but so what; it is not therefore any less true to the essentials.) Then he might have settled for the life of a meditation champion and local guru, which was offered to him not only once but twice by the most renowned teachers of the day; again he declined. Not good enough. The life of a spiritual athlete, an extreme ascetic, might have suited him; but he overdid it, once again, and nearly killed himself.

     Only after a long history of “not good enough” (and this is reducing the tale to a single life, which orthodox Buddhists would not accept), in other words, did the Buddha discover that there was a better way, the middle way (recall #10 and #138). Sitting under a tree as a small child, watching his breath and contemplating the world, had been good enough. A path of reasonable discipline walked with moderation and joy, was good enough. Being human was good enough even if, from another vantage point, it was not good enough at all. For recognizing how it is not enough, and working with that, is what makes it good enough, not simple complacency. And so not only for a Buddha, but for all of us. If that intricate balance eludes us, for now, no wonder: finding it was a good part of Siddhartha’s enlightenment.

     You can play the dangerous game of not-good-enough with anything in life, even the greatest blessings. Your job, no matter how rewarding; your friends, no matter how close and loyal; your loves, no matter how beautiful and devoted; your comforts and amenities, no matter how astonishing to others. Always the little voice will nag you: is it not possible to do a little better still? It is a treacherous voice, in a sense, and one that you must be able to silence, if there is to be any happiness in your life; but even so, the voice also keeps us moving.

     Happiness is never just about how much you acquire or attain, though it would be foolish to spurn these things as if they were of no account. It’s not that such things don’t matter, but that they cannot make you rich in the most important sense. Just as you get rich, materially, not by what you earn so much as by what you don’t spend, so you get happy not so much by what you are blessed with as by how much it exceeds your expectations (#115). Ask for ever more, as the nagging little voice will encourage you to do, and you can never be happy, however many wishes you are granted.

     (This is also why setbacks, even catastrophes, can sometimes lead to greater happiness by the most unexpected routes: because they may force expectations down so dramatically that even a day without pain, say, is a good day, or perhaps even with pain, getting to see another day at all feels like a blessing.)

     The writer’s life, almost more than any other, is beset and bedeviled by the curse of not good enough. Not a sentence in the world that could not be put differently, and perhaps improved. Even the most refined and polished paragraph is never safe from looking to its author, in the unfavorable light of weariness or self-doubt, like mere gobbledygook. Some of the most celebrated writers in history have burned their manuscripts in despair; Thomas Aquinas himself, a titanic man of letters, fell silent at last (“All that I have written seems like straw to me”), leaving his monumental Summa Theologica unfinished. And yet if these tormented writerly souls were not forever haunted by the specter of the more felicitous expression, the even better turn of phrase, the perfect word, then would they have ever become such great artists? Hardly. They would have stopped along the way, and stalled.

     Even meditation itself, meant to be a stabilizing pilgrim’s staff, can easily turn into a rod for self-chastisement. Say you manage to sit half an hour a day, no small achievement for busy and distracted worldlings. Your difficulties in life will surely persist, so why are you not sitting more? An hour then. Why not two, the prescription strength? Say you manage even that, and the prescribed annual ten-day retreat as well. Why not long courses, twenty days or thirty, or sixty, or ninety? Why stop at months: some traditions, the Tibetan and Bhutanese for example, offer retreats that last three years. Why not ten, why not twenty, why not every moment of your life? It never ends, and approached in this way, how could the supposed goal not prove ever-elusive? Luther tasted some of this bitterness as an Augustinian monk, forever reproaching himself for the inadequacy and sinfulness he discovered in himself. His moment of liberation, to speak loosely, and the germ of the Protestant doctrine of salvation by grace alone, came with the realization that he did not need to struggle so hard—redemption could only come as a gift, not a prize one earns in a competition.

     But the story did not end there. In the aftermath of Luther’s great discovery, did the Protestants with their reliance on grace alone turn into the slackers of Christianity, the lotus-eaters on the spiritual circuit, easily passing their days in the soft glow of assured salvation? Quite the contrary: especially on the Calvinist side, they ended up intensifying the problem further and making the Catholics look easy-going, with the notable exception of the old Jesuits, whose quasi-military organization was an offshoot of the Reformation, though on the antithetical side. (A touch of the Tao will easily reveal that the two, though seeming opposites, in fact go together.)

     Where does all that leave us? As usual, I can offer no easy recipes or tidy solutions here, only ways to think about a difficult issue that may be helpful, or not. Like truth and tact, or the head and the heart, in my last post, it looks like yet another balancing act to me: effort and ease; works and grace; ambition and relaxation; growth and consolidation. There is a good reason why even so formidable a mind as that of Aquinas should have fallen silent in the end: these balances are probably too big and complex for us to resolve by our merely human calculations. And maybe that is just as well, so long as we allow ourselves to be guided by those mysterious currents, impossible to pin down anywhere but no less real because they are so fluid, that go by the name of the Tao—or whatever other name you wish to give to them without pretending to understand what they are ultimately about, even  while we can make out their direction without undue difficulty.