Slaying the "ENOUGHASAURUS"

Courtesy of our recent trip to the library, I am reading a great book written by Jeff Yeager.  He defines the enoughasaurus as follows: The beast within each of, he/she that must be satisfied.  Slaying or at least satisfying your Enoughasaurus is a matter of deciding what's enough for you and then disigning your priorities and life around it.

What is enough???  I don't know.  But what I do know is that it has definitely changed for us over the years.  When we were younger and our yearly income was not much more than $10,000 we knew we didn't have enough.  We wanted a nice home, nice cars, money to vacation, etc.  Then after I was smart enough to know to pursue the education opportunity that I was lucky enough to receive, all of that changed.  Our income increased dramatically.  Instead of just enjoying that for a time, we ran out and purchased the "stuff" we THOUGHT  we wanted.  Life should be good, right?  WRONG.  I remember our son, then just 16, said he wanted to move back to our doublewide.  I asked him why.  He said because all we do is fight here.  WOW!  What an eye opener.  He saw what the "stuff" was doing to us.  We were stupid enough to buy our new house before our old house sold.  It took seven months by the way.  Trying to raise two teenagers in a new home, with two mortgages, an unexpected $400/month utility bill was a bit more stress than I could handle.  However, even though we knew it, we weren't ready to let go.

Life had something else in store for us.  Five years and a lot of spent money later, we both lost our jobs, (within a week of each other), we had no choice but to reevaluate our priorities.  To give ourselves a little credit, we had started realizing several months prior that our life was ridiculous, at least by our "true" standards.  So now, even though our home and cars are "valued" (I use that term loosely) at less than 1/5th of what they were just a year ago, we are so much happier.  Our home does not own us.  Our utility bills are amazing.  We are actually happy to pay them!  And the funny thing is, we still want to clear out more "stuff."  We are trying to make a fundamental shift in our value system.  We want to choose life and experiences over stuff.  One of my favorite quotes of all time is:


"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it."  Ellen Goodman

Sometimes I really miss an AWESOME car I once owned.  It was a hot little Toyota Celica.  It looked amazing and I felt so young driving it.  As good as it looked, it didn't suit our needs and I was tied to a car payment.  So finally I sold the car.  It was a good thing because I stressed so much over something happening to the car.  I didn't want it to get scratched, I didn't want anyone else to drive it.  It controlled me.  Thank God we are in a different place now.  I am not saying we are where we want to be.  Sure, we still look at those fancy cars and drool just a little.  I guess we always will.  But, now we try to visualize the chains that they drag behind them.  We also ask ourselves why we want them?  That helps. 

Have you slayed your "Enoughasaurus?"  Did you even know he existed?