What Was Enough

Its is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?

- Henry David Thoreau

I have a few things left to do this week. It is not an expansive list by any means. I don’t feel rushed, and honestly, if I did nothing at all, that would be just fine.

The thought itself seems to slow me down. What if this final push toward Christmas was never meant to be about wrapping things up, but about creating space for a pause instead?

We seem to do this every year. We slow ourselves briefly in a world that never truly comes to a complete stop. We create a small pocket of stillness, even if it is only imagined, and try to catch our breath inside it.

We are just past the winter solstice. The daylight holds here, marking its shortest appearance of the year. There is no drama in it, only necessity. It waits quietly before beginning its long return.

There was a period when this moment carried more weight than it does now. Not because people were wiser, but because they were paying closer attention. Light was measured. Warmth was practical. Silence was not empty. It simply existed around things.

Life may have asked fewer questions then. Or perhaps more of the answers were held quietly.

What mattered was not so much what would come next, but how long things lasted. When I think about the spaces within my own days, I wonder how often I truly leave room for that pause.

Believing that what we have is enough may be the most natural form of stillness we know. If we trust that enough already exists, there is less urgency to rush forward and more permission to remain where we are.

Nothing has ever been guaranteed. Not the weather. Not health. Not time. It wasn’t a complaint, but an understanding. You planned for what you could and accepted what you could not. In doing so, you were left with room to notice what remained.

There was once a slower way of moving through the day. That is not imagination. Stillness helped people stay oriented. There was time to sit and wait because that was simply what you did. You watched the sky. You listened to the sounds a house made at night.

Quiet meant quiet. You knew the difference between silence that carried peace and silence that signaled trouble. Silence had value because it carried information, if you knew how to listen.

Gratitude did not announce itself. It showed up in habits. Things were kept. Things were fixed. What was already there was used. Gratitude was not tied to spectacle. It was assumed, and that assumption shaped how people moved through the world.

There was a steadiness in that posture. It was calming. Not romantic. Not dramatic. Just grounded.

On this solstice, we can’t ask the day for more light. But we can make room for a little more awareness and notice the light is already beginning to return.

Waiting is not the same as lacking. Enough often arrives as presence. The kind that doesn’t ask for improvement to feel meaningful.

Some things do not need to be rushed.

Some things only need time to remain.

Talk soon,

G