This holiday season, the words I kept repeating to myself were “good enough.” Good enough, as in, who needs perfect?
I recently read Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert, about living a creative life. In one section, she writes about her creative process working on a recent novel. There was a secondary character that she felt could have been better, but rewriting the character would require changing huge chunks of the story that were working. So she chose, instead to let the character be “good enough.” For me, ‘good enough’ is about getting out of our perfectionist tendencies, which can cause a great deal of stress and even inaction. She is referring to the creative process, but it applies to life too. After all, what is life but a big, long, creative endeavor?
After reading her words, they kept coming back to me as I prepared for Christmas. My kids don’t have perfect, matching Christmas stockings with their names on them? Well, the ones we have are good enough. I think my son would really like the Millennium Falcon Lego Set after seeing the new Star Wars movie, instead of the one I got him earlier in the month? Well, the one I got will be good enough. The house is a mess with kids home from school for 2 weeks and an extra person in our house for the holidays? Well, it is warm and cozy and cluttered and loved, and good enough.
In the past, I would have tried to make these things perfect. But this year, I chose to rest in things being good enough.
So I was thinking, instead of New Year’s Resolutions – a list of things I wish to do and achieve and improve about myself – I will simply be taking these words with me into 2016. In fact, why don’t we take the word good out of the equation, and simply practice being enough?
What if this day was enough? What if YOU – your body, your mind, your heart, your life, was enough? What if there was nothing to improve upon? Instead, what if we rested in embracing an appreciation of THIS, all of it, just as it is? The messy, the imperfect, the cluttered house, the grumpy day, the busy mind, the ups and downs? What if being true to yourself in this moment didn’t rely on having life worked out or things looking a certain way?
It doesn’t mean that we can’t have goals and aspirations and things that we are working toward, personally and professionally, but inside our own skin, can we rest the in the experience of this moment being enough? What would that look like?
For me, that is the experience of ease. A feeling of deep peace. A deep exhale. An Ahhhhhhh.
This is the gift we want to give you each and every time you come to Source Yoga. My commitment to you is to provide a space where you can come and settle into yourself, as you are. Where you have the space to be. No need to be any particular way when you come to your practice. You can come here, and be enough, just as you are. Welcoming you home, to yourself.
May you be peaceful in 2016!
Erin
