Last week we listened to Chris Wood, a wonderful folk singer/songwriter who, through his performance style, takes unassuming to an art form. This was another event from the spring programme at Winchester Discovery Centre (or Library as I still think of it) which really has been a discovery and a delight.

Amongst Chris Wood’s intelligent, thoughtful songs is a beautiful one called “The Wolfless Years”.  It explores the idea that living within harsh limits may bring unanticipated rewards and restoration; the title of this post comes from the song.

So what is the meaning of ‘enough’ ? It’s a good, old English word:  in the 1300s we would have said ‘genog’,which clearly shows its Germanic roots (the German for “enough” is “genug”). I like etymologies and what they suggest:  this is a compound of ge- meaning “with, together” + -nah, from Proto-Indo-European *nek” meaning “reach, attain”.    To have enough is to reach the perfect, balanced limit where everything, as it were, comes together.    If we don’t have ‘enough’ we are in a state of deprivation.  On the other hand, as soon as we do have enough we are about to topple into excess.  It is almost a self-contained oxymoron  Not quite holding two opposing meanings within itself (as ‘cleave’ manages to do), but it only makes sense in relation to the states on either side, each, in their way, unsatisfactory and incoherent.

Shakespeare knew all this, of course:  fickle, changeable Orsino in Twelfth Night has a stressed relationship with the idea of enough.  At the start of the play, he famously yearns for ‘excess’ of music to satisfy and subdue what he believes to be his boundless, passionate emotional appetite. But as soon as he has heard  ‘enough’ then he wants  ‘no more. ‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before’.  Bigger is not better.

Macbeth famously eschews it:  His final words are ‘Lay on, Macduff. And curs’d be he who first calls hold, enough!’.  Macbeth abhors the idea of setting limits, but his pursuit of ‘more’ leads him to murder, usurpation and tyranny. While the idea of setting oneself targets seems wholly admirable to me (what else are new year’s resolutions?), Macbeth’s targets have no limits:  his is a ‘vaunting ambition’ – a boastful, empty ceaseless pursuit of power and title, through which he is dehumanized and becomes monstrous.   To live without accepting our limits is unnatural.

Life is, perhaps, all the sweeter for its having limits and there can be a sort of grace in accepting that we have had our portion. I think of Andrew Lincoln in Love Actually (ok, less high culture I admit, but I have no shame) walking away from the unattainable girl of his dreams and saying ‘enough now’.   The precarious balancing act of trying to have ‘enough’ asks us, I think, to be gentle with ourselves: forgiving of our failures, sympathetic to our heartaches; but also to direct ourselves, kindly, to ‘get a grip’ and move on.

The final limit is, of course, to life itself.  The sweetest moments must come to an end, but our comfort is that pain and sorrow will also cease.  At the end of the play, as others are trying to rouse the King and even restore to him his authority, Kent says ‘vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him much That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer‘.  Kent recognizes that King Lear has had ‘enough’.  Shakespeare expresses this sublime acceptance again and again:  ‘Finish, good lady; the bright day is done, And we are for the dark’;

Fear no more the heat o` the sun,
Nor the furious winter`s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta`en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ’t to leave betimes?

Let be.