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As I've walked my path, I can start to see that ‘enough’ isn't a solo pursuit. During my corporate years, I'd see salary or status as a measure of safety and success, but it was never real - it was borrowed. And when the music stopped because of burnout, the money was of little interest to me. I needed connection, I needed to belong and I needed to believe in something that made sense to me. I'd guess many of you might know that feeling too, even if it hasn't tipped into burnout. It shows up in smaller ways at work - saying yes to one more thing or chasing a target that was never really yours to begin with. Or maybe it’s buying something we don’t really need in the hope it might make us feel happier. When we think about our needs, we might think about Maslow's hierarchy - a pyramid to climb with self-actualisation waiting at the top once everything else is sorted. But that's not quite what he found. In 1938, Maslow spent six weeks living with the Siksika Nation in Alberta. He arrived expecting to study hierarchy and dominance and instead found a community where wealth meant generosity where, by his own estimate, 80-90% of people carried a quality of self-esteem he'd rarely seen back home. In the Siksika worldview, self-actualisation isn't the destination, it's the foundation. You arrive whole and everything above it is about how that wholeness serves the people around you. It is therefore a shared effort to support one another to collectively maintain the self actualised state you were born with through nurturing and nourishing the community. This artwork is a beautiful way of seeing that shared vision of sufficiency:
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