No Justifications

In Kant's ethics the term "person" is not merely descriptive but normative.  Persons are ends in themselves and sources of value in their own right...  People don't need justifications.  They're people and that's enough.  ~~ Rebecca Goldstein; The Mind-Body Problem 

I am, slowly, working my way through the deep stack of books (both fiction and non-fiction) by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein that I bought at the beginning of the summer.  Her writing is dense and richly textured.  There are no throwaway passages.  It requires dedication and attention to be reading her work.  I am always limited in the time available for leisure reading, and that is even more true during the school year when, as teacher, much of my reading is in preparation for my classes each day.  I can't imagine that, at the rate I am going, I will finish Goldstein's catalog anytime soon.  It is taking me about 2 months per each book, so that puts me out in the range of another year and a half, give or take a bit.  It's OK.  I'm in no rush.  Reading her books is a bit like a long, meandering, ever-deepening chat with a good friend.  It can take as long as it takes.

The quote here is from the very end of her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem.  I like it very much.  The story revolves around what she refers to as the "mattering map;" the internal calculation that many of us make pretty regularly about how we measure up in comparison to everyone else.  The question that plagues us as self-proclaimed "wise men" (homo sapiens) -- who matters in this context, and am I counted among them? She comes, in the end to this conclusion, drawn on Kant, that it is enough to be people.  Just that.

I found that thought comforting and enlightening.  Having spent most of the last dozen years in some sort of frenetic, self-imposed worry about where I stood on the mattering map of my own life, it feels really good to have the knowledge that I matter.  I matter, not because of how I stack up in some sort of contest against all the others that I can see, but simply because I am a person.  That is enough.  Enough.

What is it to be "enough?"  It is calm in the face of all of life's ups and downs.  There is no retribution for having fallen short somehow.  I am not deficient in any aspect.  There are none who are better or worse.  We are all people.  That is enough.

It is enough to be exactly who I am.  Exactly where I am.  This age.  This position.  This place.  This relationship.  This set of skills and talents and lack of capacities.  I need not apologize.  I need not agonize.  I need not worry that someone who matters MORE will notice that I am only pretending to my place, and then I will be exposed for the fraud that I have always feared I might be.

It is enough to look the way I look, dress the way I dress, believe the way I believe, love the way I love, and live the way I live.  Being enough frees me in a way that I have never known.  I will not march to the drumbeat of the market culture.  I will not measure my wealth against anyone else's.  I will not gauge my skills and abilities and unique places in comparison to anyone else.  I will be the human person that I am, living my part in the great drama of the universe, and that will be enough.