What is it?
Exquisite Sufficiency is an articulation of a new way of organizing our lives, our work, our social systems, and our economy. Based paradoxically on an old understanding of our place in the fabric of all of life, an idea still lived by a few cultures on Earth today and pointed to by many spiritual traditions, Exquisite Sufficiency asserts that we are enough exactly how we are right now. We do enough each day, each week, each year, and we have enough of whatever it is that’s required. Seemingly simple, this notion flies in the face of a culture steeped in a personal story that reads like a chronicle of scarcity – not enough time, not enough love, not pretty enough, not good enough at our jobs or marriages, not enough shoes in our closets, or square footage in our homes or degrees on our walls; we are plagued with this sense that we have not measured up, and never will. Looking from the larger social perspective, we have masterminded an economic model that requires scarcity to fuel the engine. Scarcity is what drives economic value. If a commodity is not “naturally” scarce, then a false scarcity is engineered and promoted to ensure that said commodity becomes economically valuable.
The flip side of scarcity is, of course, abundance, or said another way, our quest for more than enough: more time, more love, more personal growth, more economic growth, more resources, more capital, more square footage, more sex, more money, more self worth, more enlightenment, more vacation time, more choices, more goods. Accumulation and maintenance of capital is the primary measurement of success. Both in our economic and in our psychological models, there is always room, desire, and a feeling of need for more.
Our never ending hunger for more has resulted in depleting our natural resources to such an extent that we are actually in a collective conversation about whether life on earth will survive. Regardless of whether you concur with the evidence being presented, the very fact that we have gotten to a place where we have to dialog on the topic is enough to have or make? us gather our attention and energy and ask: what else is possible?
What is enough? Enough time, enough love, enough accumulation, enough acquisition, enough shoes in our closets or clothes in our drawers, enough self development or satisfaction? How would we even identify it when we saw it given our conditioning to turn away from the question itself only to continue striving for more again and again? What has it cost us to always look outside ourselves for our contentment?
Life on earth was actually given to us for free. We did not have to earn the bananas hanging off the trees. We did not have to earn the clean water flowing from rivers and streams. We did not have to earn or accumulate or make anything we have been using for thousands of years to live our lives. All of it was given free of charge. In this period in human history where industrialization has been the dominating force in society and accumulation of capital has become the world’s largest – and invisible – religion, we seem, most of us anyway, to have forgotten this most basic truth that life and all that we need to live it was simply given free to all creatures roaming the planet. When we can see clearly, even for a moment, that all we need is right before us, and it was offered freely, something begins to shift. It is time for us to recall the lush and exquisite enoughness of the earth and of our own inner resources.
Why us?
We have spent the past eight years investigating this distinction of Exquisite Sufficiency first introduced into the cultural lexicon by Buckminster Fuller and then popularized by Lynne Twist in her book, The Soul of Money. A small group of us banded together to investigate what it would mean to live a life from the truth of our Exquisite Sufficiency. During our period of intensive personal investigation, we began to think out loud within our communities. This thinking turned into action in our personal lives and through us offering seminars and salons, and then to create and hold three Global Sufficiency Summits. This last one in April of 2010 was held on the MIT campus and brought together thought leaders from the fields of sustainability, economics and organizational change to discuss how the context of sufficiency might provide the ground for a comprehensive model of global systems change.
We are dedicated to supporting a social profit organization called The Global Sufficiency Network (GSN). The GSN acts as a portal for spreading this conversation throughout the culture, and as senior advisors, our voice plays a major role in influencing the conversation’s direction and impact. We are launching a curriculume currently titled, Exquisite Sufficiency: A New Way Home to be launched through the DailyOM website, reaching a membership of 1,000,000 readers as well as a week long version delivered in person at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. In addition, we just launched, through our work with the GSN, a tele-series in collaboration with Maestro Conference that, within the first week of being marketed, has enrolled 3,400 listeners. At Seven Stones Leadership Group we have dedicated ourselves to developing all of our work including how we run our own enterprise inside of the distinction of Exquisite Sufficiency. Leading with our personal and shared narratives in our roles as mothers, wives, daughters, housekeepers – we are ordinary people living, working and experimenting inside this distinction.
As organizational change agents, transformational leadership consultants and business strategy experts, we weave together several key bodies of work that enable us to think with breadth and depth about how to create a sustainable shift on the global paradigm. Our networks enable us to collaborate with innovators in the fields of academia, economics, organizational change, sustainability, and politics, which further broadens our reach and positions us to engage with the many people who are in positions to enact the change to which Exquisite Sufficiency is pointing.
Why now?
Currently the human community is using 1.4 planets worth of resources to fuel our life styles, mostly in the west. [Source] We are reaching the limits of the current paradigm of scarcity and consumption/accumulation. Given this model of infinite consumption and accumulation on a finite planet is causing loss of bio diversity, chronic and preventable illness in otherwise healthy people, a shrinking middle class, huge gaps between rich and poor, structural poverty and mass hunger when there is enough food to feed all 6.7 billion of us, many visionaries and change agents are being called to think about how we might turn towards a more sustainable model for life on earth for all.
A rudimentary understanding of systems thinking tells us that structures are what shape behaviors as well as thoughts and feelings. Just as the structure of the eye shapes what we are able to view, so the structure of the society shapes what we are able to enact, create and think. It is our stance, therefore, that to actually make the shift from a dominant consumer culture to one of citizenship and stewardship, we must look at the very structure that gave rise to our practices that have tilted us so far out of balance. Without this foundational shift in our structural mindset, all of our attempts to make sustainable change will be simply like re-arranging the furniture in a burning house. We may soon have solar power and wind turbines dotting the landscape, but these tactical changes will not actually make a difference to the quality of our lives. If we deplete our natural resources beyond repair, or chronically neglect the communities impacted by structural poverty – fast creeping into traditionally middle income families – we will fail to turn the course of history towards a socially just, sustainable world.
In a moment where the economic climate is shifting, our population is increasing exponentially, natural resources are quickly being turned into more stuff, and the Internet and globalization of the world are altering how we live and work and think, new conversations are emerging. In a historical moment where the infinite accumulation of more is no longer an option, people are beginning to ask themselves: “What is enough?” In this moment of unprecedented unhappiness in the modern industrialized world, people are asking: “What if I were enough just as I am – no improvements necessary?” What if there were another way to live that could take better care of our hearts and minds, take better care of our children’s future and take better care of the planet? These questions that are alive in the hearts and minds of people at every level of income, in every neighborhood around the world, along with the unprecedented pressures on economies and our planet, make this THE moment for this new context of Exquisite Sufficiency to give rise to all of the solutions to the problems we face as human family.
