Enough

When I think of the word enough, I hear the razor blade of my sister’s voice when the dogs keep barking. A command. An admonishment. Enough.

I feel the sliver of nervous anticipation before a new friend comes over and I take stock of the bowls of potato chips on the table and the six-pack of Heineken in the fridge. An accounting ledger. A social tissue. An expression of care. Is there enough?

I remember the taste of bile in my throat as the last day of production approached with 4 scenes left to shoot and a budget too small to keep going beyond that day (and I suppose before that: growing up with standardized tests and essay deadlines and exams closing in on me). A possession. A lack thereof. Not enough, never enough time.

What about enough change, enough progress, enough time? As climate crises continue, exacerbate, intersect in increasingly destructive ways, I ask myself, and climate work more generally: what is enough? Becoming vegetarian and driving EVs and recycling shampoo bottles cannot outpace the rates of extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Moreover, if we were to stop drilling altogether, it might reduce harm in the present moment, but would not be enough to stop destruction from happening. So what is enough?

I grapple with enough because the tensions within this single word are often easier to distill than the bigger questions that arise in the context of the climate crisis. In turn, these distillations offer a seedbed to engage those bigger questions without being overwhelmed by them.

The astonishment of language is that it can inhabit multiple meanings simultaneously, but the crisis of language is its ability to both inhabit and evade a singular definition. Enough can mean a limit being reached, or a fulfillment of sorts, or it can be placed alongside its negative to indicate lack. For me, this word has always produced some level of anxiety: a doubt around the type of productivity I’m dedicating to a day or an essay; or a self-help mantra reflected back on my social media feeds: you are enough. When I finally looked it up, I was surprised to learn that its definition has to do with being satisfied or satiable. It isn’t actually about restriction or limitation at all. The dog has barked to completion; the chips are sufficient. 

To reflect on the origin of this anxiety, it’s helpful for me to articulate the origin of this essay, which started with a metaphor: words are seeds. Each word holds within it a future life and the capacity to imagine something new. If a word is a seed, then everything else becomes soil: the sentence it is placed within, the person who speaks it aloud, the socio-political and cultural landscape wherein they reside. The question ‘what is enough?’ looms for anyone thinking critically about what it means to live within the confining structures of a neoliberal capitalist society. I have heard friends pose this question to themselves in calculating the tradeoff between feeling depleted throughout a work day—throughout every work day for the next five to ten years—so that they can have financial stability for themselves and their family and their dreams later. I’ve been in conversations where this is posed as a hypothetical for the CEOs of Exxon (Darren Woods) or Amazon (Jeff Bezos) or Chase Bank (Jamie Dimon) as it becomes more confusing how someone could possibly justify a new oil rig or gross profit margins when it comes at the expense of our ability to breathe clean air. The answer always feels like a sigh, a disappointment: neoliberal capitalism does not seek to satisfy and is not satiable. It seeks to grow. It seeks to extract. It seeks to sustain itself, no matter the cost.

This scarcity mindset colors the mis/understanding of how we define this word, but more importantly, it obscures the fact that there is more than enough: there is plenty; there is abundance. Being able to construct new narratives requires new language, but it also requires owning the meanings of language we’ve inherited. Words in combination, rooting into each other, have the power to articulate a different future altogether. When we place words alongside each other in surprising patterns, we create new meaning. I suppose this is another way of describing metaphor: metaphor is our bridge to making language more material and owning the language we’ve inherited.

I wanted to learn how to animate this idea of language as a seed—metaphorically, but also literally. Visuals offer meaning when words fall too sharp and also too flat, when even metaphors feel like an exaggeration and an inadequacy. It’s a comfort to be able to turn away from language, even as I write and think about it. As I sit in front of Photoshop, trying to turn words into seeds,  I click on an icon: a series of circles following one another. I haven’t yet learned the software and so am still moving on instinct and curiosity, and so this is how I learn about tweening. Short for in-betweening, it’s a way of speeding up the notoriously slow animation process by taking two frames and overlaying them. The combination of frames makes motion more fluid, more like motion.