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Suddenly, I saw it. “You are enough.” It appeared on bumper stickers on the trucks. On a giant banner in the warehouse. Embroidered on the uniforms of the drivers. “You are enough.” We can roll trucks while still keeping that reminder present. We can move on to the next thing while acknowledging that *more* is a desire, not a need. We can venture out remembering that what we’re search for is not perfection, but growth, and that where we embark from is a place not of hunger, but of satiation.
What is enough? - The Aesthetics of Joy
Ingrid Fetell Lee
The logic behind these results is that when dealing with a complicated problem, even the smartest person can get stuck. Adding a new perspective or a new set of skills can unstick us, even if the perspective is off-the-wall or the skills are mediocre. The fresh input works much like the Oblique Strategies employed by Brian Eno or the random leaps used by silicon chip algorithms. It’s the difference itself that helps.
And this is why Wallace was wrong to say that “you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.” You really can’t do that, which, I believe, he discovered: his ceaseless self-examination caused him ceaseless misery and contributed in a major way to his early death. Better to follow the principle articulated by W. H. Auden: “The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone.”
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