Becoming familiar with enough

Recently, several experiences with businesses I've trusted for years left me thinking about what happens when trust becomes less certain.

None of these relationships ended because a company made a mistake. Mistakes happen. Things break. People get things wrong. What matters is what happens next.

What changed was something harder to repair.

I no longer felt confident that the relationship was as honest or transparent as I had believed it to be.

It made me think about how much trust is involved in the ordinary act of buying something.

We trust that what we're being told is reasonably true. That the price means what we think it means. That a recommendation is actually a recommendation. That the information we share will be treated responsibly. That the thing we're buying will do what we're told it will do.

But there is another part of the relationship that interests me just as much.

We also have to trust ourselves.

We live in a world that is very good at creating desire-and sometimes fear.

There is always something newer, better, faster, prettier, more efficient or more desirable waiting to replace what we already have. And there is no shortage of messages suggesting that something we aren't doing, buying or protecting ourselves against could leave us vulnerable.

We are shown rooms more beautiful than ours. Clothes that promise to make us look younger, slimmer or more attractive. Products designed to solve problems we hadn't noticed until someone pointed them out. Limited-time offers that suggest we need to decide now. Trends that quietly turn things we liked perfectly well yesterday into things we're supposed to replace today.

None of this means buying something new is wrong.

Sometimes a beautiful object brings genuine pleasure. Sometimes a better tool makes life easier. Sometimes we discover something we didn't know existed and realize it would serve us wonderfully.

The question isn't whether we should buy.

Perhaps the more useful question is whether we can hear ourselves clearly enough to know why we want what we want.

Wabi-sabi offers an interesting counterpoint to a culture built around wanting more.

It asks us to notice what is already here.

To appreciate what has lasted.

To allow something to be useful without requiring it to be perfect.

To recognize beauty that hasn't been polished into sameness.

And perhaps most importantly, to become more familiar with enough.

Enough isn't deprivation.

It doesn't mean never wanting anything else or surrounding ourselves only with old, worn things.

Enough is simply the ability to look at our own lives before looking outward for someone else to tell us what we're missing.

Sometimes what we discover is that we really do want something.

And sometimes we realize we were perfectly content until someone suggested that we shouldn't be.

I've begun to think that knowing the difference is a quiet form of freedom.

When we become clearer about what matters to us, urgency loses some of its power.

So does comparison.

We can pause before clicking.

We can question the bargain that suddenly seems impossible to pass up.

We can choose the thing that suits our life instead of the thing we're told represents the life we should want.

And we can keep something we already love even after the world has moved on to the latest version.

This doesn't make us immune to marketing. I certainly am not.

But perhaps intentional living isn't about becoming immune to influence.

Maybe it's about becoming familiar enough with our own values, preferences and

priorities that we can recognize when something genuinely belongs in our lives—and when someone is simply trying to convince us that our lives are incomplete without it.

There will always be another beautiful thing.

Another improvement.

Another sale.

Another reason to want more.

But there is also the life we're already living.

And before we add something new to it, perhaps we can pause long enough to ask whether the the desire-or the fear-is really ours.