Enough is Enough

He can't help it, really.  After all, there was a time when he was all alone and on his own--scavenging, starving.  There wasn't enough.

But now his brain is stuck in that place, a place that screams "shortage." He spends most of his time reacting to the screams.  He's never far from the potential for satiety, the refill, the handout.  He's an addict.

I've thought about ways that I might help him overcome his insecurity and my own feelings of pain and frustration at his fathomless fear--I've thought about some kind of therapeutic intervention, some new gestalt. But there is no reason here. There is no reason to doubt that there will be a next meal, a safe harbor, a home....and there is no reason to overcome the doubt.  It is survival.

To some degree, we are all survivors of trauma, and victims of our own ensuing insecurities.  We may not hover around our food dish like Thomas the cat (who in the years since we took him in hasn't missed a meal or snack, has grown big as a turkey and rightfully earned the title "Fat Boy"), but we do hover.  We hover around that which will address, however temporarily, our shortages and shortcomings: the holes in our souls.  Food or clothes or shopping or politics or religion--the lofty and the lowly--we all seek to satisfy that which will never be satisfied.  It works for a while, whatever it is, until it doesn't work and we're back, hovering, hoping, longing.

Until we find the reason.