This week’s blog is slightly different from previous instalments, as we have something very important remind you of.
You are enough. You, reading this blog post, wherever you are. You are enough.
We spend so much of our lives trying to reinvent ourselves - to be better, healthier, stronger, to have more skills or get that dream job or promotion. But the thing is, a goal like this is never the end goal. There’s always the temptation of another one behind it. Just as soon as you can run 5km you start aiming for 10km, just as soon as you get one promotion you set your sights on another.
You may have dreams and goals and plans, and we hope you do, as there’s nothing wrong with being ambitious with your aspirations. But each goal has to be a building block, a milestone to be reached, rather than a stepping stone to reinvention. You are enough just as you are.
As Matt Haig writes in his book Notes on a Nervous Planet: “You were incredible from the day you were born. You were everything from the day you were born. No one looks at a newborn baby and thinks, oh dear, look at all that absence of stuff. They look at a baby and they feel like they are looking at perfection, untainted by the complexities and baggage of life yet to come. We come complete.”
As Haig points out, no ambition or goal will ever be the end ambition, or the end goal: “There is no future. Planning for the future is just planning for another present in which you will be planning for the future.”
In response to this somewhat strident statement, Haig offers some advice: “Try to want less. A want is a hole. A want is a lack. That is part of the definition. When the poet Byron wrote ‘I want a hero’ he meant that he didn’t have one. The act of wanting things we don’t need makes us feel a lack we didn’t have. Everything you need is here. A human being is complete just being human. We are our own destination.”
It’s always a good idea to use Spring as an incentive for new beginnings, inspired by the freshness in the air and the sprouting of daffodils. But Spring should be about renewal, not reinvention, as there is no need to reinvent what is already enough.