Permaculture in Action

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Enough

Yesterday was my grandson 3rd birthday. I bought him a book and I made him some felt food, fried eggs and pancakes to play with when he's pretending to cook. I managed to pick up a little apron from a LETS trading day and found some utensils from our camping things that we didn't want anymore. He loved his felt food and made us pancakes and eggs again and again. (Sorry there are no photos as I couldn't find the camera).

A little later his dad came home from work and I stayed to watch Evan get his present from his family. It came in a lovely red parcel, which he opened very carefully, with a look of awe and wonder. Inside he found a little Dr's kit. A stethoscope, tweezers, scissors etc, very similar to the one I gave his mother when she was a little girl. After checking everyone with the stethoscope, he packed up his doctors bag and went off down the hall to ''work''.

This morning I got a text message from daughter which read....

                                                     Evan: "I don't want poppy to give me any presents because I've                                                                  already got one and two and that's lots of them and that's
                                                                 enough"

Out of the mouth of babes!!!!

As a child, Mark remembers that his father would give this answer when asked if he would like a second helping at meal times. "I've had an eloquent sufficiency and anything more would be superfluous"'

Now I know that this isn't quite the quote as it was first spoken, but it is how Mark remembers hearing it as a very small child.

Do we even know when we have had enough? My three year old grandchild does. It would be lovely to live in a culture of ''Sufficiency'' , do you agree?

6 comments:

  1. If only more children could be grateful and satisfied with what they have.

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  2. That's sweet :) My gran used to say she had an "ample sufficiency", and we had to say that instead of saying we were "full".

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  3. So true and I find it applies in so many areas of life. For example we are about to sell our house and we are focused on getting enough to feel repaid for the energy input but we are not going to be greedy.
    I think in the west our concept of enough is very distorted and many people have no concept of it at all.

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