Every day, I write in my journal, and every day at the end of my entry, I write a series of reminders to myself. They are things I want to engrave in my brain, thoughts I want to bubble to the top when I need a reminder. For instance, “This is it,” meaning that we only exist in the present moment and right here; everything else is imaginary, and when I am tempted to despair it’s usually because I am trying to exist in the past, the future, or somewhere else entirely. If I am sitting worrying about the state of the world, the passing of people who mattered to me, or the probability that my grandchild will find the world hard to bear now and then, it helps to stop and look around me. Even if everything I see and feel happens to be deeply unsatisfactory, it’s all that I have to handle at the moment.

There are other exhortations I note down every day, but the one I most often use is, “I have enough.” Every time I write that down, I am startled, and it’s the thought that I most often find myself re-thinking during the day. A poster by a favorite artist, printed out, framed, and shipped to me from the museum with the touch of a finger? I don’t need it. A pretty sweater in a thrift shop, in a color I keep buying? I have several heavy sweaters and it’s almost March. A massager? A futon mattress to replace the unsatisfactory one I bought five years ago? Solar heating? A replacement for the steps in my back yard? Not this week. I have enough.

I have more than enough, honestly, if I look around me and notice that this is it. I have posters and prints all over my walls. I’m wearing a cotton sweater in a particularly evocative shade of blue, and it’s one of eight or nine sweaters I already own. The massager I have, that is perfectly adequate to the task of attacking that long band of pain that crops up on the outside of my leg just before I go to bed on my relatively comfortable mattress? Works fine. I rarely use the steps. And the heater, which is new, is sighing away happily and warming my house.

My problem is rarely that I lack anything. My problem is usually that I have too much, and too many, of the things I have yearned for already today, before 8:00 am.

I still want to get a different mattress and get rid of the heavy Mission bed I sleep on, mind you. I still would like to get solar panels installed on my roof. I may eventually get that poster, which was exactly the one I wished was in the museum bookstore when the artist had a show. But not today.

Maybe I’m thinking of this because I paid the bills yesterday, including the real estate taxes. But I’m more inclined to think it’s because I saw a book in the bookstore the other day, knew that it was just the right thing, and bought it, only to realize last night when I opened it up that I had already read it. That was why it was just the right thing.

I have enough of “just the right thing,” and that’s hard to believe when I’m in the grip of yearning, but it’s constantly, over and over again, and unfortunately, true.

I will forget that at least once today, I’m sure. Especially since I’m going to an art fair at the local library later on, will have the urge, in the moment, to buy something, and will forget that I don’t actually need that particular thing.