107. Satisfied.

It’s 32 degrees today (Google tells me that’s 90 in Farenheit). When you live in a place that gets seven or eight full months of winter, it’s easy to feel scarcity and urgency when summer finally arrives.

Soak up the sun, as Sheryl Crow says.

With the possibility of only a handful of hot, blue sky summer days, the unspoken, internalized summer mission seems to be … you must do all.the.things. Be sure not to waste even a minute of it. Carpe Diem. With more hours of sunlight, each day fills with just a bit more, one more drop, one more visit, one more thing, one more pool toy or ice cream cone. Kids crash into bed, dirty faces and feet, having had just one more marshmallow, one more swim, scratching mosquito bites as the sun glows orange with another passing day.

This fullness of summer can both feel extremely satisfying and with the sun setting earlier and cooler evenings upon us, it can also leave us grasping and pushing for more, for the perceived emptiness of winter lingers just around the corner. And so on a day like today, a perfect summer day, I woke up “coulding and shoulding” myself. Despite being tired and my body telling me very early this morning, that today would be low and slow, the brain fights: “We could go to the beach, we should be jumping in the lake, we could go and see those friends we haven’t seen yet, the garden, the lawn, the to-do list, we should… we could …” I feel it, and can see it in the kids too, when we jump from one thing to the next, without time to exhale, to find our way back to … enough.

We’ve been talking a lot lately in our family about noticing that we are satisfied. “Are you satisfied?” we’ll often ask each other, when the request comes in for something more, or the shoulding or coulding starts. Of course, we’ve learned in so many ways to strive for, to grasp for excess, for more. More things, more time, more experiences, more activities, more gadgets, more options, more. Too often putting the cart before the horse mentally moving on to what’s next without being fully present in what is.

How often life can feel this way, like there’s so much to do, could do, should do, could have, should have, could experience, should experience … that has us grasping at scarcity and urgency and fear and the elusive satisfaction that will be found somewhere out there.

But what does it mean or look like to be satisfied? As adrienne maree brown asks … Are you satisfiable?

What if we knew and trusted and embodied a felt feeling and awareness of even mere moments of being satisfied, content — of having and doing and being … enough. What might become possible?

Pleasure is not about generating or indulging in excess... (or) going to extremes to counterbalance longing.... (it's) learning what it means to be satisfiable, to generate, from within and from between us, an abundance from which we can all have enough.    ... rather than encouraging moderation over and over, I want to ask you to relinquish your own longing for excess and to stay mindful of your relationship to enough.  How much ... would be enough?      - adrienne maree brown -  "Pleasure Activism" 

Fill in the blanks with those three dots above.

How much …

… summer fun days.

… time.

… travel.

… connection.

… work.

… knowledge.

… money.

… house.

… love.

—- would be enough?

Can you imagine being healed enough?  Happy enough? Connected enough? Having enough space in your life to actually live it?  Can you imagine being free enough? Do you understand that you, as you are, who you are, is enough?   - adrienne maree brown, "Pleasure Activism" 

Francis Weller adds another layer, to satisfaction, as I’ve often heard him refer to primary and secondary satisfactions:

Our biology and our psychology were shaped together over a long period of time to help us survive as a species. For the vast majority of human history we have lived in a tribal or village context. That’s where our primary satisfactions took shape. From the moment we are born, we expect to be a part of a tribe; to step out of our enclosure in the morning and see many pairs of eyes looking back at us; to find those people there to meet us and to affirm us; and to go and gather food with them and build a fire and perform the rituals the community needs. When that doesn’t happen, we feel a great emptiness, even if we aren’t consciously aware of it …

For thousands of years we were nourished by being members of a community, gathering around the fire, hearing the stories of the elders, feeling supported during times of loss and grief, offering gratitude, singing together, sharing meals at night and our dreams in the morning. I call these activities “primary satisfactions.” We are hard-wired to want them, but few of us receive them. In their absence we turn to secondary satisfactions: rank, privilege, wealth, status — or, on the shadow side, addictions. The problem with these secondary satisfactions is that we can never get enough of them. We always want more.

Francis Weller

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And so, I’ve been thinking about satisfaction a lot lately. For years, decades perhaps, I was not willing or able to be satisfiable, often in my mind, thinking I would arrive someday, somewhere else at satisfaction. And last night, standing outside, in the warm summer breeze in just a t-shirt, looking at the sun setting and moon rising, while I filled up the water for the horses, shovelled horse poop, and waited for the last chicken to meander up the ramp so I could close their door, I was fully aware of my satisfaction.

And today, on this blue sky, sunny summer day, I was absolutely satisfied with staying put “doing nothing” for the entirety of the day. Doing nothing, of course, was a lot of little somethings, and has nothing to do with being productive.

What might become possible as one shifts from thinking that satisfaction is out there somewhere, to finding it in the here and now — to being more present, noticing gratefulness, and being with the grief that inevitably arises?

Enough feels easier for me to find in the summer. More of those primary satisfaction experiences, perhaps. So when the mind wants to take me off somewhere other than here, even in the coldest, seemingly empty days of winter, I can check in with my body and ask, in this moment, am I satisfied? And if not, what would I need to be satisfied? What would be enough?

Knowing that at some point in time, life will tell us that satisfied or not, that’s been enough. I want to be satisfied.

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I’ll end with a list of questions from adrienne maree brown on this podcast, “Hurry Slowly”:

• When was the last time you were satisfied?
• What do I need to feel satisfied?
• Can you imagine being satisfied?
• What are the things that satisfy you in a given day?
• How do you know you’ve done enough in one day?
• Do you understand you do not have to produce anthing to deserve satisfaction?

And this one, which is currently working me, as someone who has more than enough, and realizes only now that satisfaction is much more of an inside job ….

• Are you in touch with what it is to have enough? Can you identify what is enough in your life and redistribute everything else?

And one more of my own …

• Where and with whom might I nourish some of those primary satisfactions in the rhythm of my days?

"... Once we find our primary satisfactions, we don’t want much else. Though primary satisfactions are rare in our culture, we do experience them. We can remember what that felt like and let our longing for that state become our compass, telling us what direction we need to go to get back to those satisfactions."
- Francis Weller 

That’s enough ;).

Until Next Time …

N