Finding enough.

I drifted into a disorganized philosophy of enough over decades out of a sense that everything we're supposed to be maximizing just makes our lives into a business endeavor to be managed and guided by the diseased principles of maximal efficiency and maximal profit, after like I was floundering and exploring creepy system cults like Getting Things Done™ and Pomodoro and all the magical systems we're supposed to use to write in our notebooks properly, or organize our existences properly so that we can Be All We Can Be™ and Reach Those Heights™ and prove that There's Nothing We Can't Do™. To be fair, I was never one of those I Was Stuck In The Rat Race™ types who go one to write fawning guidebooks to Being Minimalist The Right Way™—I've always been sort of chaotic neutral on the doing-stuff front, which makes it odd that, when I think back on my life as I'm pushing sixty, I find I've done a whole fuckload of interesting stuff somehow without trying to maximize my being.

I had a dream the other night where I dreamed I was back in my old role as an operatic supernumerary (the fancy term in opera culture for a lowly extra), and it brought back a flood of recollection of how odd and interesting it was that I managed to somehow have a twenty-year "career" (side hustle would be more accurate, but it wasn't a particularly profitable one, as I spent more on gas and parking over the years than I got paid to carry props around and be human scenery) in opera, despite being a middle-of-the-road schmuck who couldn't sing. I have a lot of moments lately where I feel like I could recite my own version of Roy Batty's tears in rain soliloquy in Blade Runner, just on that stretch alone:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. I've had Placido Domingo sit on my lap in a comically huge chair and tasted his sweaty forearm. I've been vomited on by Denyce Graves, helped Ella Fitzgerald microwave a terrible vending machine sandwich, had Secret Service guns drawn on me in an elevator, and watched a stupid news anchor fall off a dieselpunk Valhala set in Götterdamerung. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in ra—oh, wait a second, I can write all this shit down. Yay!

After years spent in developing an unintended career as a factotum with finely honed skills, I no longer have much main character energy remaining, even when I'm doing my stage storytelling shenanigans. I have narrator energy, and narrator energy is all about circumspection and making something of what's happened without having to be the superstar at the center of things. When I was a kid, my mother, overwhelmed by the frustration of rearing a complex, difficult child, told me, tearfully, that she was sure God had a plan for me, and for a bright, shiny moment, I was a little unsure if maybe I was the next Jesus, but fortunately that feeling passed quickly and I found the plan the Tao had for me instead (wu wei for the win, y'all).

The thing about having narrator energy instead of main character energy is that the great big bloviating oafs can act out their florid scenes and their grandiose intentions and wave their dumb sweaty arms around while announcing their desperate, clawing need to be the brightest stars in the night sky, but those of us who aren't so visible can take notes from the sidelines, the wings, where we're waiting for our cue, and the crowd scenes, and find the joy in the not-obvious.

What's not in the realm of the not-obvious?

Traffic. Parking problems. Heaving crowds one dropped water bottle away from a surge that kills dozens. Looking in a mirror and seeing nothing but wrong, all because of a scar here, a fold there, or a wrinkled forehead. Surge pricing. Fucking Ticketmaster. Credit card debt up to the armpits. Disappointing vacations where you find that the Mona Lisa isn't really all that impressive, or that you'll never get that unimpeded-by-mobs view of the Taj Mahal that the postcards promised.

You can beat the world, but I can rewrite you, and you'll never know who I am or where I came from.

I am nobody, going nowhere, and that is fucking delicious.

I am Walter Mitty, or can be. My daydreams contradict themselves all the time, but I contain multitudes, even though I wear more or less the same outfit every day, down to the dumpy cargo shorts and New Balance sneakers my kid chides me about, which fit my dad bod perfectly well and need no addenda. Sure, I'm a go-go dancing nun when called upon to be, and my handiwork is literally part of the Baltimore skyline, and I can stand on a stage and talk into a microphone at length without a script, but these are all products of flow more than artifice. I seldom set out to be special, but when you don't wrap your being around the rigid scaffolding of aspiration, accidents of human connection and general doofiness turn easily into the tools of inhabiting your own story fully and without the undermining sensation of not being enough or not being good enough, or even Not Living Up To Your Potential™, which was bandied about my middle school counselors' office so often it just turned into surreal word salad.

What the hell is my potential? I don't even know who I am yet!

And sure, sometimes it's nice to be seen, just in a glimpse. After years of working in the arts in Baltimore, an exhausting, complicated, stressful, and unprofitable line of work that I did until I couldn't do it anymore, there was a day at the annual Artscape arts festival where I was pedalling a tiny bicycle in roasting Maryland summer heat up the sidewalk behind all the booths with a backpack stuffed with ticket money collected from the various venues that I was conveying to the admin trailer tucked in a side street by Mt. Royal Station, and a woman on the sidewalk ahead of me looked surprised, then delighted.

"It's you!" she said, as I slowed to a stop.

Oh god, am I being robbed?

"Um, yes, that's who I am, yes," I said, breathless and saturated with sweat. She grinned the broadest, warmest grin.

"I just moved here a couple years ago, and I started noticing that, every time I see something amazing in Baltimore, there you are, just in the background, working on things! You're everywhere!"

I fell into the moment, just shocked, really. My jobs were all in stage-black, designed to be as invisible to the public as possible, like when I was working as an art handler and would be sent on a mission with a backpack containing a locator transmitter, a stunningly comprehensive secure container wrapped in a ragged Jansport, and a Picasso sketch, on a cheap-fare Megabus from DC to MoMA in my blandest street clothes. It's a thankless task, sort of, but I grew to love it more and more, and here, my cover was blown…but in a good way.

"I get around," I said, still a little stunned by being recognized.

"We're so lucky to have you," she said, and we shared that moment before I pedaled off with thousands of dollars in another nondescript backpack, keeping the machinery moving, still reveling a bit in that someone thought that.

Enough is such a perfect bar for where to stop, in the same sense of Le Guin's mistranslation of Chuang Tzu — To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. I do what I can, then know when to stop, rather than chasing after the mythical max.

I will never be the richest man alive, nor the most handsome, most accomplished, or most beloved. I will probably not be the best parent, the best friend, the best artist, the best writer, or the best craftsman, and all of that is okay. I know when to do my work, when I have reached the best balance of work and result, and then I put down my tools. If a poem is never finished, only abandoned, per Paul Valéry, I am content to leave behind a lifetime of unfinished work that I am nevertheless proud of. Yeah, I wish that odd or missing word or conjunction wasn't there, but I'd rather press Post Comment than be caught in the edit window forever.

I am sitting in a cheap IKEA chair with my bottom of the line Macbook writing a long, long, probably too long reply to this post because it validated some of how I think, and no matter how much I've proofread before it gets locked up in the Metafilter no-edit realm, I will post typos and weirdly phrased things that I could find and fix…but learning when I've done enough, even when I'm nowhere near perfection, has been a thing that's unlocked what I'm truly good at, because it's the insidious self-doubt of trying to be correct to the letter instead of in the whole of a thing that stops us from doing our best things. I'm sitting beside a bookshelf that's not quite as square as it's meant to be, in a room where I can see little mistakes I made when I painted it, where some things are in weird places not because of a powerful aesthetic, but rather because they are where the damn cat won't get to them. It is imperfect, and that is fine, and so am I.

And I'm not truly unambitious—I just have the sense of where ambition fails and becomes more of a drain. I aspire to revive my old one-man-storytelling podcast, Last Night I Dreamed Of You, and to get more readers for my ghost.io journal of the same name. I aspire to write a new one-man-show for any small stages that'll have me, to finish the ambient record I want to make that's an homage to After The Heat, and to self-publish a couple collections of stories one of these days. I'd be happy to get in better shape so I could be a better player on my curling league, and to clean up the fish pond, but the way we structure our ambitious to work like business plans hatched in endless committee meetings, or worse, in sermons from the cult, just produces nothing but the smog of failure and more self-hatred in a culture that just lives to slosh around in that muddy mess like pigs fighting for dominance in a foul-smelling waller.

I can't aspire to satori, oblivion, the holistic death of my ego, or (impossibly) to not aspire to things (see also: the white bear in the corner of the room), because I like being a big dorky fat old animal loose in the world and often full of myself, but I can know, on a visceral level, where that fuzzy line of what defines the breakpoint between not enough and too much lies, and let it shape me without systems and cults and sermons and business plans telling me what to do.

And in the end, most of what I hope to do will be unfinished, but I've ridden the paternoster lift in Vienna City Hall, heard "Claire de Lune" played by an orchestra, eaten my baker friend's incomparable paw paw cream pie, and there's more yet to come until there's not, and that is well and truly enough.

JOMO abounds, particularly in comfortable shoes.

©2026 Joe Belknap Wall (original text posted to Metafilter)