Enough

The human brain is a funny thing.  I have a house with magazines all over—on coffee tables, on nightstands, in the bathroom and on kitchen counters… but I’m mostly not intending to read them.  Yet when I see a magazine in my kitchen trash, it sometimes calls to me to check it out (it could be that Atlantic I really must get to, it could be breaking news about Victoria’s Secret—that is a magazine, isn’t it?).  This morning it was More.  Now I don’t personally have anything against More, but its tag-line, “celebrating what’s next” struck me as anti-enlightenment.  After all, if Echkart Tolle is onto anything with his Now-Power, then getting more and thinking about what’s next, even if it’s a focus-grouped laser beam onto one’s very own demographic (tips for grey hair, looking good in jeans even if you’re not skinny, etc.)—thinking about the future—is the exact opposite of being happy.

And so, I’m starting my own magazine.  It’s called Enough.  It’s not your parents’ Enough (that’s Enough Already) and it’s not your kids’ Enough (that’s Enf and arrives via twext)—our Enough is a magazine expressly for us nerdy band-of-outsider-parents and I think you’re really going to enjoy it.

Enough is inspired by Seinfeld, but it takes content about nothing to the next level—a magazine so devoted to the fact that we have enough and are enough that it doesn’t even need to actually exist.  It’s a concept that I’m hoping to distill down to a notion.

Everything about Enough makes us feel good—magically filling us with patience, compassion and abundance.  It has no ads because the whole point is that we don’t need anything.  It goes beyond non-profit—costing nothing and earning nothing.  Enough has no tips or suggestions, as it knows we’re already good enough; it has no photos and stories about other people’s lives because everyone’s life is just as interesting.

Enough may not exist—but it does so as an act of generosity and love.  Our tag line:  “Not existing because… it’s Enough” (it doesn’t even need an exclamation point!).

In my non-existent “Note from the Editor” to non-existent readers, I thank Sartre and Camus because when I was a kid they helped me re-frame my life in bourgeois suburban Chicago, encouraging me to be just anti-social enough to get out (although I spent the next few decades humbly trying to crawl back in, at least to a comfortable middle class life, sans the attitude and leavened by gratitude).  I had always wondered how, given their existential philosophy of meaninglessness, Sartre in particular would actually bother to write such long books, or to write at all.  As I mature I am realizing that they wrote as acts of love—edgy, real and esoteric love that both saved me and intellectually inspired me in a world where I could never find “my people” much less my direction.

Now you may wonder how I can afford to start a non-existent magazine in tough economic times, but I’m using the fortune I made from the non-existent chain of restaurants I didn’t start—Basta Pasta! But that’s what it’s all about:  giving back.

And so I write with my own sort of love, in my own voice, with a plan to not write one of these days… subversively happy in the present moment and inviting you to join me.

So, today let’s just not—in the service of all our collective children.

Namaste, Bruce