Enough

One of the most meaningful insights I come back to over and over when I describe my experiences in Ethiopia to others is my realization that despite having very few material things, the people of the Omo Valley live very joyful and satisfying lives.  It would be easy to think that is just the children and they grow older the realities of their harsh life become clear but I just didn’t see that.  The willingness of the adults to help, to care, to sing to dance, to play, etc convinced me they live very joyful lives.

I came across a couple of insights this week I will share below which explore this phenomena a little deeper.  The first is a distinction between happiness and joy as defined by the greeks:  “Happiness describes the freedom of the rich from normal cares and worries, or to describe a person who received some form of good fortune, such as money or health.  Joy is described as the culmination of of being and the good mood of the soul”.  Happiness is fleeting, Joy is much more persistent when available to us.  Thank you to Anne Robertson for these distinctions.  I share this one because it explains for me the deeper sense of satisfaction I observed in these people and this is joy.  It is not defined by what we have and instead by who we are.

The second insight comes from a book by Lyne Twist called “The Soul of Money”.  This passage further described the difference between me and the people of the Omo Valley.  “For many of us our first waking thought is “I didn’t get enough sleep.”  The next one is “I don’t have enough time.”….We spend most of the hours and days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of.  We don’t have enough exercise.  We don’t have enough work.  We don’t have enough profits.  We don’t have enough weekends.  Of course, we don’t have enough money, ever.  We’re not thin enough, smart enough, pretty enough, successful enough, educated enough, fit enough.  Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something.  And by the time we go to bed, our minds race with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day.”

I didn’t experience “not enough” in the Omo Valley, their attention appeared to be on the more fundamental things in life, how do we protect our rich culture and traditions, maintain who we are.  I expected to observe resentment over what we have that they didn’t and interestingly I didn’t experience that at all.  They have enough.

Thank you to Brene Brown for references to the above passages.