the mentality of more 🥠
if all I ever have is this, it'll be enough for me.
Last night, I left my favorite water bottle in a Lyft and the White Elephant Gods granted me fifty two fortune cookies and a bottle of Pinot Noir.
Today, I got shit on by a bird and cut my lip open with a dermaplaner.
Because I’m on this mental health journey and am really striving to always look at the positive, take the high road, see the good in others, I decided to embrace getting shit on by this bird who was simply living her life, and go the “it’s okay, it’s good luck!” route. This is hard to do when your friend Hannah is scrubbing your hair with a pilling paper towel and hot skateboarders are staring, your favorite water bottle is traveling somewhere on the BQE in a Toyota Siena, and you have fifty two fortune cookies on your counter instead of a chic cutting board.
In between washing my hair and clotting my lip, I ate the first cookie. It felt ceremonial. Bird shit good luck and fortune cookie wisdom make sense hand in hand.
“The way to get to the top is to get off your bottom.”
You heard it here first: even the fortune cookies in New York are in on hustle culture.
It starts with you can do better. You can upgrade. There’s a better outfit, apartment, job, boyfriend, haircut. Nothing you already have will work. It has to be better. You can be cooler. Skinnier. Hotter. Just keep hustling, buy more things, spend more money, kiss more people, drink more alcohol.
You’ve heard this before. You’ve felt this before. It’s deep rooted in the capitalistic culture, pervasive in its nature. It might not have a singular name, but the notion of existing in this country means you have to keep going. On a survival level, you simply need to keep working to achieve a semblance of a decent life; have you seen these prices? But on a personal level, living in New York, it’s constant. Everyone’s changing jobs, upgrading their gym membership, cancelling neighborhood reservations to go somewhere else because so-and-so said that this place on that block was the place to go.
The race to be something that someone else said we should be is impossible to avoid. But how can we be different or interesting if we keep competing with one another to be an outline of something that was made up?
That bird, wherever she may be, has fabulous timing. Sitting on the ledge, we were talking about stability. When it feels like the rest of your peers are buying real estate and renting it out or becoming millionaires off crypto, it can feel silly to admit that you like the stability of your nine-to-five job. Why does it feel like it’s not enough? Hannah then explained this concept of “Dayenu” to me, it’s a Hebrew word in a prayer for Passover that loosely translates to “it would have been enough.”1
While I was nearly crying over this beautiful sentiment my friend chose to share with me, the bird chose to strike. It was a test to apply this concept of Dayenu to my life. If all I ever have is a deep conversation with a good friend, even if that conversation is tainted by bird poop, it’ll be enough for me. Maybe I’ll never be famous or write a book, but I will be the friend that learned something new from a friend they love. I’ll be someone else’s funny “this girl got shit on by a bird” story that they get to tell their roommates about while they laugh over this complete stranger’s misfortune. I might not look my best at my holiday party this week with my sliced open lip from a dermaplaner, but I’ll definitely be the girl who gives fortune cookies out with all her Christmas gifts this year.
And for real. If this is as good as it gets, I’m okay with that.
There’s definitely a larger story / concept to this word and I don’t want to misquote so I encourage you to do some further reading.