The Sound of Enough

Suddenly and without explanation, the television in our living room went completely mute. No matter what buttons we push or what cords we plug in, we can’t get any sound out of it. Even hooking up a spare set of speakers didn’t help. The picture is fine and the channels change, the DVD player works; we can watch whatever we want, we just can’t hear anything.

This is not a major catastrophe, I realize. Vegging out in front of the television is a luxury most of the world does not have. Plus, with computers and cell phones and radios, we are hardly cut off from the outside world, and we didn’t really watch that all that much TV anyway. But I’ll admit that my first instinct was that we had to get it repaired as soon as possible.

I’ve been re-reading a book called Longing for Enough in a Culture of More, by Paul L. Escamilla, in preparation for a class I’ll be leading this fall. It’s got me wondering about this impulse to repair or replace everything right away, this pull to accumulate more and more stuff. Why is it so hard to imagine living without a TV? Escamilla suggests that what we need is a “slowly dawning awareness… that the prospect of ‘more,’ though awakening appetites that run fairly deep within us, is not ultimately satisfying. ‘Enough,’ while rather more lacking in curb appeal, has proven over countless generations to be a trustworthy tool for gauging what we really need.”

We’ll get the television fixed eventually – or in this crazy throw-away world, we’ll probably have to buy a new one – but for awhile maybe it will be enough to do without. Maybe I’ll reach for a book instead of the remote when I’m ready to decompress at the end of the night. Maybe I’ll dig out my old Indigo Girls CD’s and listen to music again. Maybe my family will play a game together instead of watching a movie. For the time being, and while the summer light still lingers in the evening, maybe we’ll listen to the crickets instead of the talking heads, and we’ll give thanks that we have enough.