How Much Is Enough?

I had dinner with a friend last night who has been through a rough couple of years (honestly, rough doesn’t even begin to capture it, but that’s all you need to know). It was good to see him happy. I knew he could eventually get to this place, but I was genuinely pleased to see that he had actually made it there.

Had I experienced the same circumstances, I can’t be sure I’d do the same. Things had gotten pretty dark.

The conversation turned to money and purpose, and how money may be the means for so much of what we need, but it can’t be the driving purpose of what we seek. He has an earned clarity of pricelessness that I’ve rarely encountered.

It reminded me of an old story, possibly apocryphal, about some journalists (or was it authors?) at a party with several titans of industry and finance. One of the journalists gestures to one of the billionaires and tells a colleague, “I have something that he’ll never have.”

“Right,” says the colleague, sarcastically. “You do know there is nothing in the world, no-thing, that he couldn’t buy and have hand delivered, probably within days’ time?”

“I still have the one thing that he’ll never have.”

“Ok, I’ll bite. What, pray tell, is that,” sensing the punchline at hand.

“Enough. I have enough.”

No amount of money can draw that line for us. Only an appropriate amount of life can do the trick.

Better to learn and accept it than resist and fight it.