How much is enough for you? It seems a crucial question and yet a question which, perhaps, all-too-few people could answer readily. It's a question perhaps considered off-the-wall in a business supplement. True, business people are rightly keenly aware of the bottom line and their break-even point. But they don't tend to be characterised as people who seek "just enough and then some" profits. With the frenzy of economic growth all around us, it might appear to be a business jackass who would set his sights on "enough" growth, "enough" productivity, "enough" workload.
So has spirituality - growth of the human spirit - got anything to do with business? Is business incompatible with a more healthy and holistic approach to life, where the Holy Grail is something other than sales targets, takeovers, career progression or shafting the competition?
A healthy balanced lifestyle will juggle many aspects of life, including maintaining a healthy body, mind and spirit; being committed to interesting, varied, challenging and well-paid work; and staying in harmony to the best of one's ability with oneself, one's family and friends. In a recent issue of Resurgence magazine, Wolfgang Sachs retells the Heinrich Boll story in which a tourist comes upon a simply dressed man resting in a fishing boat and asks him why he's doing nothing while he could be out on the sea catching fish. When the fisherman replies he caught enough that morning, the tourist dons entrepreneurialspeak. If the frugally dressed man fished more often each day he could vastly improve his productivity and profits, invest in more boats and before he knew it build a fish processing plant with his own distribution network to source vast markets.
"And then?" asks the fisherman. The tourist thrills in expounding how the fisherman could then while away his time resting at his ease by the lapping sea in the beautiful sunny breeze. There is both a personal question for us here and a question for any business we run or work for. If we do not know how much is enough for us, we will be constantly striving to get "more" - that elusive, non-specific and ultimately dissatisfying goal. Yet "more", which dupes so many of us into living unhealthy lifestyles, over-stressed lives, hearts and bodies and under-attended-to relationships, lulls so many of us to become the walking dead. Business is perhaps somewhat adverse to notions of sufficiency or sustainability. But our children will hardly thank us for consuming finite resources of the earth at quite the current rate. And with each melting iceberg, the very earth may be whispering that enough is enough.
Is it the price of "progress" that so many of our children should be crushed and bashed to their deaths in the daily madness that is the Republic's Ireland's killing fields today: our roads. Each man invincible as he drives his killing machine above the speed limit. Each pedestrian invincible as they walk in barely visible clothing along country roads. Is all our building activity in the construction sector worth a single life? Is any manufacturing process worth the loss of a single worker's limb? Is any career worth the break-up of a marriage or the loss to fathers, mothers, sons and daughters of the growth of their family relationships?
Wolfgang Sachs' article in Resurgence (issue 196) was a cri de coeur to slow down. He notes for instance that the car was initially seen as a time saver. But instead of saving time, it merely connives to get people travelling greater distances. And so spending just as long travelling but consuming more resources than before.
Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin in their bestselling book Your Money or Your Life (Penguin) also ask that crucial question: how much is enough? They suggest that you figure out how much you earn per hour. Take on board direct and indirect work costs such as commuting to work, work clothes, professional associations etc. When you figure out your true hourly rate after all work-related expenses are deducted, you could be shocked that you spend in a given month the equivalent of 25 working hours' earnings on, say, eating out but spend, perhaps, only eight hours with one of your children.
Sachs' recounting of the story of the fisherman could be seen as a metaphor for the Republic's economic frenzy. If it succeeds in prompting us to address how much is enough for us, we might discover how we could have lots of healthy and wholesome time on our hands.
For a free sample copy of Resurgence, phone 0044 1237 441 293. jmarms@irish-times.ie
