The art of just enough
A lesson from Swedish philosophy.
There’s a Swedish word that has no clean translation in most languages called Lagom. It means “just the right amount.” Knowing when enough is enough. Finding the right amount and resting there.
Lagom carries two ideas at once. The first is social: what we take from a shared plate, a shared resource, a shared world, affects everyone else at the table. If three cookies disappear before others have had one, that’s a small but telling example. Lagom asks us to hold that awareness without being told to. To see our own appetite in relation to the people around us.
The second idea is more internal. Many of us have absorbed the belief that more is better, that a larger number in a bank account means a better life, and that abundance and happiness move together. Lagom disagrees with that notion. Enjoying what you have, as it is, does not mean you are settling. Contentment and complacency are different things.
There is a moment most of us have felt but rarely named, when a meal is exactly right, when a conversation with a friend stretches just long enough, when a day feels complete. That feeling is lagom. After all, a coffee with a friend is a good thing. Ten coffees with ten friends does not make it ten times better. There is a point at which more stops adding anything, and lagom is knowing where that point is.
This finds a resonance in something Bhairav Nath Shukla observed across 44 years as the manager of Mukti Bhawan in Varanasi, a guesthouse where people check in to die. Having sat with over 12,000 people in their final days, he noticed one pattern more than any other.
“People stop eating indulgent food when they know they are going to go. The understanding that dawns on many people in their final days is that they should’ve lived a simple life. They regret that the most.”
He also speaks of people stopping mid-step in the courtyard to listen to the devotional songs that play three times a day, absorbing a note or the sound of an instrument as though hearing it for the first time. “People who are too critical or too proud find it hard to find joy in small things because their minds are preoccupied with seemingly more important things.”
What Shukla witnessed was not people who had failed to live well. It was people who found the understanding of what living well meant only when everything else fell away.
Lagom asks us not to wait that long.
Finding the just right,
Team FUEL.