Enough happens to us all. Enough is personal and powerfully social. My month of April was enough.
Enough is experiential like sex, money, and father or mother. This sort of word purposefully means different things. Money doesn’t mean the same thing to a ten-year old as it does to me. Meaning depends on our current context.
In this post-modern, post-Einstein world, we tend to use the term “relevant” to talk about this kind of neurological slight of hand. Do we talk like a physicists because it sounds smarter and conclusive? Yes, but in spite of how we talk our thinking may be muddled.
For the humanist in us all, we might note that relevant conveniently attempts to avoid the issues of Faith, Hope, and Love by virtue of inappropriate scientific association. These three are eternally bound to enough and those other dicey words mentioned above.
In the Laws of Human Gravity…
Enough is the Human Event Horizon
There the bits are all torn asunder and rearranged. Information appears to be lost, but somehow never really isn’t.
Speaking of singular(ity) experiences…
In my first semester in college I have enough of Latin. I choose instead to take Russian. Mind you this is the heart of the Cold War. I’m tone deaf. I don’t consider Chinese an option.
My Russian native language instructor is a dissident professor of English and Linguistics from a major Soviet university.
She had enough.
KGB is Enough to be Scared of
The CIA secreted her out of the USSR. The US granted her political asylum for passing scientific state secrets on to them. She is an asset. She is safe housed, debriefed, and then appropriately assigned to teach promising Ivy League students to speak and think Russian.
She also continues her work in the emerging science of neuro-linguistics. This is fascinating, brand-new stuff at the time - at least to me.
It makes sense to everyone to have her reverse the magic she has performed so well for long enough.
Ymen First Class
I am a mutant freshman member of her tiny US class.
We experimentally get to try to learn Russian in the same manner a state-of-the-art KGB agent learns English.
Think of it as a 70’s version of a new Common Core for Russian.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t truly lock us in a building in total isolation until we understood. That would have worked.
In class she frequently uses the word “enough” to compare the trying insanity of English pronunciation to the stately and more guttural march of her Slavic tongues. I forget how many languages she knew – a lot of them by all accounts.
She cries, “What’s with this word ‘Eee New Gaah’?”
Poor me. I have a notably Amercianized silent “GH” is the middle of my Middle English last name - Til-GH-man. She has fun with that each time she calls on me to recite. We recite incessantly.
Funny thing. There is no formal Russian translation of my first name. None is needed, but
That is Not Enough
She quickly discovers the roots of my first name. I become her - “Big Fish” and/or “Little Fish” depending on her mood. Forgive me, if I forget how to say THAT in Russian.
Anyway it was probably her nickname for the head of a Russian crime syndicate, the KGB, or the university chair. Maybe a secret CIA code word? Who knows? She giggles every time she says it.
Enough Already
Russian is the only class I ever fail. I am sadly late to the final exam. I sneak off to attend a seminar on emerging black hole theory at MIT in Boston. I understood about as much of what they were talking about at the seminar as I did Russian – not enough.
On Sunday afternoon I discover the Nor’easter. Like Napoleon I have trouble hitchhiking back in the snow.
On Monday morning Her Slavic Majesty won’t let me in the door when I am an hour late to a 4 hour exam period. I am guilty of a flagrant lack of personal discipline and diligence.
She tells me to, “Go fish” - Actually she combines my nickname with something more colorful that even I could understand in Russian. Russian is indeed a colorful and expressive language.
I learn, and not for the first time, my enough is not her enough.
The result is a situation that comes to naught.
Which is why folks are awfully concerned about enough so much of the time.
Enough to Naught
The Quandary of Enough is not one of comparative relevance. The sense of relevance is internal to us. It’s an heuristic process our brain does. We know this. We can prove this. Enough is a manifest of our internal expectations - a Pit of unending guess we are all too willing to stumble into. In the Arrow of Time, our expectations are not meaningless. They are never enough.
In the State of Enough we can only build on the things that remain – Faith, Hope, and Love.
Being human we will try to make even these eternal things personal and about our expectation.
That we can overcome.
To Overcome That is Enough
Like JayLo in the movie by the name “Enough”, the time may come when you’ve had enough with messing around with your own personal AutoCAD Civil 3D templates and styles. That can be a painful and very expensive education. It can lead to some colorful language too. There is hope.
Our Production Solutions are More than Enough