Enough is enough

Christian Century, June 18, 1997 by Nancy Mairs

This year, for the first time in my 53 years, I prepared an income-tax return. This was doubtless a foolish use of my time. After all, last year we shoved a mess of papers at the tax preparer and then paid him a mere $75 to make sense of them. I spent at least 24 hours just initiating myself into the arcaneries of TurboTax (which is not so highly charged as the name implies), so even at minimum wage I'd be a bad bargain. Last year, however, the tax preparer made a careless error. "Well, I can make a mistake for free," I told my husband with what would turn out to be baseless bravado, "and even though I'm a mathematical booby, I'm a whiz with computers. I'll do them."

George didn't hoot, though he did look a little dubious as I fired up the computer. Some weeks later I sat back, utterly wrung out, while the printer spat forth page after complicated page of my handiwork. I've been waiting for the IRS to come cart me off to prison for the terrible botch I'm sure to have made.

Despite fatigue and apprehension, I'm glad I undertook this task. For one thing, in 34 years of marriage I never before gained such a clear view of our finances--an unconscionable lapse in a woman who claims that hers is a partnership of equals. Now a bit of the murk has lifted. For another, the exercise has confirmed for me the conviction George and I have long held that, even though the combined incomes of a high school English teacher and a wheelchair user on Social Security would strike many as paltry, we have all we need.

This sense of sufficiency can be hard to come by in a society premised on scarcity. Immigrants will come and confiscate our livelihoods, we fret; pollution will destroy the very air we breathe and the water we drink; small children will bleed away our scant fiscal resources with their demands for food, medicine, education. The certainty that there is never enough of anything to go around condemns us to a state of chronic anxiety.

I have a friend, for example, who worries that she has only $20,000 in her savings account. (She confides this as though I knew what it is to have a $20,000 savings account). When her daughter and son-in-law come for a week's visit, she decides she can't afford to rent a lift-equipped van that would allow them, both severely disabled, to get around with ease. In frail health, they are unlikely to live long, and if the money were mine, I would squander $500 of it on them right this minute, the one scarcity I readily acknowledge being time. Clearly, I am the grasshopper to my friend's ant, and it will serve me right to get carted off to the poorhouse (if the IRS ever lets me out of jail) for my improvidence.

But I am not in the poorhouse at this moment, and this moment is the one in which I live. If the poorhouse comes later, then I'll live in it.

Our society would unravel altogether if we stopped believing in scarcity. Unless one perceives a lack one won't spend one's money to fill it, and getting and spending have come to seem the source rather than the waste of our powers. To the blandishments of consumerism I am as vulnerable as anyone else who picks up a magazine or flips on the television. I want. I want. I covet a computer twice as fast as the one I use, even though no microchip can force me to write at other than my accustomed glacial pace. I yearn for a power chair that would raise me to eye level when everyone around me is standing. I wish I could have our cramped kitchen renovated so that George, who must prepare all our meals, could work more comfortably.

I forgive myself these cravings, aware that they are merely symptoms of a kind of social soul sickness rather than needs that must be filled if I am to live "the good life." I have--while too many do not--a modest but comfortable house, more to eat than my aging metabolism requires, a closet bursting with clothes, a serviceable vehicle, medical and dental insurance. If I must worry about material possessions, glut threatens my well-being, not privation.

In one of his thornier parables, Jesus concludes: "For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away." On the face of it, this appears to be little more than a cynical appraisal of the world's colossal unfairness. Still, Jesus is never depicted as a cynic, and no doubt Matthew drafted this passage with the eschatological intent commentators have ascribed to it. Since I don't believe in hell, however, this passage as originally framed yields me precious little insight.

But the marvel of the Gospels lies in their capacity to be reframed in ways that illuminate the full range of human experience, and so these words resonate for me here. If you believe yourself richly blessed, they suggest, then your life will seem to brim over with goodness; but if you feel deprived--of money, prestige, affection, control, whatever you value most--you will squander your energies defending whet little you perceive yourself to have.