( a guest post by Steve Matthews, shared by permission of the author )
I found myself strolling through a forest in southeastern Poland, taking some deep breaths, trying to get some perspective. I was halfway through a summer volunteer program assisting as a teacher at an English language camp. The young adults attending the camp were from across Poland, and while I found the students delightful and the setting beautiful, I was at odds with the rigid religious fundamentalism being espoused by the administration of the camp. The students came to the camp for English lessons, not for religious training, and the texts we were using and the approach suggested felt ideologically manipulative. How could I teach this stuff (even if it was for just three more weeks)? I was frustrated, feeling alone and inauthentic.
On that July day in 1995, in the shadow of those trees, three unsolicited words welled up from deep within me and I heard myself say, “I am enough.” I had never heard those words uttered in a way that allowed me to take them to heart before. I’m not even sure that I even knew what they meant fully. I do know that once I said them and said them again, I felt an immediate release in my body and spirit. I felt freed and relaxed. The angst was gone. After a few minutes of standing quietly, I turned and walked back toward the camp. But I returned with a kind of knowing that freed me to be myself with those students. Instead of feeling the pressure to conform, I chose to be playful, to listen and respond with heart, to accompany the students and their desire to learn English with enthusiasm, and to enjoy myself with them.
The camp was not perfect. I could not change the curriculum or the fervor of the administrators. But the human connections I made with those students shifted that day. I was a better teacher, a more compassionate friend, and once again a happy adventurer in a strange and beautiful country. I was not perfect either, but I was enough. I was enough for those days, for those students, and that deep sense of enoughness filled my cup again.
In the course of a human life, the discomfort that I felt in the summer of 1995 was miniscule, but somehow that one wakeful, heart-opening moment in that southern Poland forest was a portal. Something shifted in me.
There have been many times since 1995 when I have wondered if that portal has rusted shut. I have felt depressed. I have disappointed others and myself. I fail. There are times when my confidence is shot and I second-guess myself at every turn.
The truth is that I am not really enough for everything that life throws at me. I am not enough to keep my family and friends safe from illness and heartache. I am not enough to measure up to society’s idea of success. My self expectations and the expectations of our culture are often unrealistic for me.
But I am enough to show up fully me, warts and all, in the face of joy, crisis, disappointment, opportunity, sickness, and health. I choose to believe that “enoughness” is not a fleeting illusion or a new-age allure. I believe that enoughness pulses in my blood and through my marrow. It is my truest nature and my most authentic self. It is inherent in what it means to be human, Inherent enoughness is mine and it is yours.
When I let go of my perfection complex, my fix-it nature, my need to measure up, and simply stand in the moment of life with two feet grounded in the belief that my presence matters in this moment, my authenticity and my love is freed, I become a beautifully imperfect portal of possibility.
I think this may be enough for me.
(c)2014. Steve Matthews M.A., M. Div. is a Spiritual Director, a writer for Upper Room Books, and a consultant for The Episcopal Church.
