HOW TO REGARD YOURSELF AS ENOUGH WITHOUT OVERSHOOTING & BECOMING AN ASSHOLE / NARCISSIST
A brief, partial, disjunctive, & aspirational guide
Get tired, bored, and old.
A poet friend recently asked me a completely normal writer question which can be translated roughly as “how sparkly is the sparkle you’re sparkling with?” OR “Since we’re all trapped in the business of more-ing, do you need to see if there’s a way to more?”
My answer was basically: I’m old and bored, and my heretofore efforts at more-ing have yielded less than the nasturtium seeds my children buried in the neighbors’ dog’s turds, so we’re going with what we’ve got, and to that end… I’ve decided what I’ve got is great. As is.
(To his full and abiding credit, this friend’s response was an emphatic and sincere “great!” in kind. He did not miss a beat. Reader, get thee friends who are completely on board with bored/old/tired, not in a tolerant way, but in an appreciative or even celebratory way.)
Develop a fascination with facts, Just the facts, one that is no less potent than a three-year-old’s need to carry completely unremarkable stones in her pockets as irreplaceable treasures until she suddenly and summarily forgets about them and they spill back out onto the driveway, already in place for tomorrow’s harvest.
Likewise, do not bother to make the effort to regard any one rock (fact) as better or more interesting than another, and don’t get into those $50 science museum gift-shop rock polishing kits they hose 9-year-olds’ parents for (maybe Jimmy will be a geologist??). This is about the AS IS of driveway rocks. Don’t even indulge in “each is special in its own way” recreant rhetoric— JUST the rocks, ma’am.
Hold them, feel them, stare at them, listen to them click against one another, even pocket them. However, as you begin to touch on a whiff of covetousness, just to be sure you’re really fully present to the rock-ness of what’s going down—at that very moment, when you start to think they’re somehow yours, or special—drop them. Walk on. They were never yours, and you’ll get to hold them again tomorrow.
Get better at asking questions.
A few good question hacks: