. . . on having enough
A FEW WEEKS AGO, my boyfriend started baking bread every day. He makes two kinds, a soda bread he learned how to do on a cookery course and a friend’s failsafe seeded bread. Neither are breads that require proving or, for that matter, kneading. It’s just simple bread for a life we are trying to live as simply as we can.
Things are different now: he bakes his bread. I make our lunches from dinner leftovers to bring into work. We bring coffee in a flask when we go to the park. Instead of wandering into shops and making impulse purchases, I wander into shops and look at all the things I used to think I needed.
Sometimes I even stroke them. I pick up neon nail varnishes and carry them about in the shop as though I were headed to the tills. I feel the perceived loss of things less when I do this. It feels like a choice. I could have you, I say to the fake fur gilet that would never have suited me anyway, but instead I choose to put you back. Bye now.
The taxi drivers of Dublin are in mourning, having lost one of their best customers. My friend doesn’t know what to make of it. “Are you in a taxi?” he used to say when he called. “You are always in a taxi.” Now, I am on the bike or on the bus and the bus drivers of Dublin are sick of this woman asking questions about where the bus goes to and how long it takes to get where I’m going.
I didn’t come to this point gracefully. I was pushed, I didn’t jump. But here I am. Feeling oddly giddy at a fourth day in a row spending exactly no money. Here I am, appreciating everything much more, from the €2 coin found down the back of the sofa to the bag of ingredients for tumeric tea with the recipe written on the side given by a friend to cure a raging sore throat.
It’s not all Enid Blyton, home-baked produce and lashings of ginger beer around here. It’s not all Little House On The Prairie, although with a name similar to the Ingalls you’d be amazed how often in my life myself and little freckly-faced Laura have been compared.
There are challenging days when the smell of fresh bread does nothing to relieve the stress of an unexpected but necessary expense, but so far – mostly – this new approach has given us far more than has been taken away.
It’s shown me the unexpected beauty in how the kind-of-sort-of running programme I’ve been doing costs nothing except commitment. I put on my runners and go out into the night and I kind-of-sort-of run. Simple.
Exactly one year ago today I wrote an article for the features section of this newspaper about the philosophy of “enough” or what’s known in the trade as “enoughonomics”.
Anne B Ryan of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, who has been researching this notion for more than a decade, gave me tasks so that I could try living for five days with enough. I did, but I was a five-day wonder and I only started thinking about it again yesterday. The bread was enough, and the not spending was enough, and enough was also the night spent recently with a friend sipping tap water – “tap water?” asked the unsmiling bar person – during which I laughed so much I thought my head was going to explode.
“We tend to be overloaded with expectations, information, people, decisions, choices and time demands,” Ryan told me at the time. “The overall effect is to make us feel emotionally overloaded, because we end up feeling that we are not good enough or not coping well with all the demands.
“Exploring the concept of enough is about asking questions of ourselves, what do we really need, what can we do without? What in every area of our lives is really enough?”
She told me something else. That the phrase in Irish for enough, go leor, is the same word used for “plenty”. Enough is plenty. And I forgot all about it until the smell of bread freshly baked every morning emerged as a symbol of the enoughness I’ve finally learned to not just to embrace but to appreciate.
There are positive repercussions. Because he makes the bread, I eat less bread than I used to. You don’t tend to plough as greedily through the stuff when you know and love the person who made it. Also, the children now think this is where bread comes from. From his hands. From our oven. “Daddy’s Bread” they cheer when it’s placed on the wire rack as though he were Johnston, Mooney and O’Brien all rolled into one.
The bread rises and I ask myself questions. What do I really need? What can I do without? I don’t need any more nail varnishes. I don’t even like gilets. There’s bread in the oven. It’s go leor. It’s plenty. It’s enough.
In other news . . .
Laya is an Indian music and dance spectacular featuring everything from Bollywood tunes to classical Carnatic music. The charity event, which integrates Irish and Indian culture, takes place from 5pm today in Dublin’s Liberty Hall. Tel: 086-8881905 for more details. Tickets €10 (€40 for a family).