How Can It Get Any Better Than This

Already good enough with room to grow.

I spend most weekend mornings in cafés, usually the same one, except today I have gone to three before landing, driven by the feeling of needing something different, maybe even better. I ask for a banana and the barista gives me the whole basket, and pours me a very hot latte that burns my tongue and I can’t taste.

The place is massive, filled with people: a group of older men in a bike group; some college-aged girls working; a guy with incredible eyebrows who sits next to me with his avocado toast. I am reminded of the word sonder: “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”¹ Sonder, for me, allows the feelings of deep aloneness and intimate connection to coexist. I think of my own vivid and complex life, which keeps getting more entertaining, and less predictable, and all of the equally colorful lives of those who sit around me right now. There’s so much to discover, I keep remembering, there are so many people to meet; life is filled with endless possibilities.

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When I was in college, I would fill my planner with lists of everything I wanted to try and people I wanted to know. I tried so many things during those years, tearing through ideas and worldviews like clothing, driven by curiosity and a hunger for experience. Every new chapter thereafter, including this current one I’m in, has been characterized similarly: I certainly don’t keep a planner (I’ve given up planning), but I continue to be propelled by the desire for change.

It was during those first years of undergrad that I started experimenting with the idea that everything that falls out of my life—whether I want it to or not—makes room for something better to arrive in its place. Over the years I’ve come to really believe this, and because I do, I see evidence everywhere of it being true. When something doesn’t work out, it’s easy for me to trust that something else will come and feel even more right.

The opposing side of adopting this perspective is that I am sometimes overwhelmed by the fear of missing out on my own life—a supposedly truer, even better version of my life. Always, before I commit to anything, or anyone, I oscillate between desiring what the commitment may bring and the fear of missing what I won’t experience because of the choice I made. What if I miss out on something even better? What if there is something even more exciting and fun and satisfying? What if I miss it?

I sometimes wonder if it’s wrong, to desire excitement and newness so consistently. I occupy this state of perpetually looking ahead toward the next thing, ready to taste something new. I sometimes wonder if it will ever stop; if I will ever be fully satisfied; if I will constantly be desiring new experiences, unable to rest in stability. Should I just be grateful for what I have? Should I, (god-forbid), settle and be content with ‘good enough’?

But, I know, to deny my insatiable desire for experiences would be to deny myself of satisfaction. By pretending to be always content with an already-good-enough life, I would deny the potential for that elusive, but oh-so-exciting, even truer life. As it turns out, it is this hunger for change that brings me so much satisfaction and fulfillment. Believing that life can keep getting better does not feel like I’m sentenced to chasing the unreachable dangling carrot—rather, it feels wildly expansive, like I’ve been set free to discover all of what life has to offer.

Desire, like hunger, is only ever able to be temporarily satiated. If we treat desire lightly, holding it with an open palm without grasping for specific outcomes, we can discover what the desire is here to teach us. Culturally, desire has been so demonized: we are taught either to repress or be consumed by it. But desire needn’t be feared: it’s here for us, to reveal who we are, and show us the way forward. We can allow it to come and go, as it does, rather than become ensnared by its allure. The process of honoring our desires, and seeking to fulfill them, invites us into new experiences and keeps us open to growth.

As we all know, hunger for change can easily veer into a state of everlasting dissatisfaction with the present moment. A fixation on achieving more, or better, can often come from a place of shame or lack, and fuel obsession. This is why we treat it all lightly.

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It’s ok to let ourselves want. We are supposed to evolve, and evolution is often driven by the desire for more, less, or different. Let us practice desiring change from a place of already good enough.

There will always be the potential of something even more true and delightful and surprising around the corner—if you choose to view that potential as a possibility. The key is to become content with exactly the way things are, right now, and to consider that whatever is coming might just be even better. We, with our minds and bodies, collaborate with life itself: we have some capacity to affect what shows up in our external worlds. Approaching life from a place of already good enough and can get better may just make that perspective come true.

Maggie

1. This word is actually a neologism—a recently coined and accepted term that can be found here.