I Am Good Enough
By Ajahn Brahm
When you have a healthy sense of self-worth, then you don’t need to play the ‘I Am Better Than You’ game. You don’t need to prove yourself. A healthy sense of self-worth comes from realizing the true meaning of being perfect.
A woman walked in a forest looking for a perfect tree. All she saw were crooked trees, tress with missing branches, and tress with damaged barks. Then she went into a government managed plantation where she saw all the trees perfectly arranged in rows and lines, perfectly straight with all the branches perfectly in place.
She realized that the damaged trees in the forest were far more beautiful and calming than the ‘perfect’ trees in the artificial plantation. Then she also understood that so called ‘ damaged’ people are more beautiful than artificial people.
She begun to feel at home with herself, as much as she felt at home in the natural forest with all the gnarled and crooked trees.
She understood the real meaning of perfection. She had been a long time ‘good enough’. Only in the forest did she realize it.
This story was extracted from Ajahn Brahm’s book, ‘Good? Bad? Who Knows?’