For obvious reasons, everyone talks about gratitude at Thanksgiving, but what about the concept of “plenty”? Isn’t Thanksgiving a time for sharing what we have with one another? And don’t most of us have “plenty”?
Strangely, another word for plenty is “enough,” although most of us associate plenty with more than enough. Webster’s first definition of plenty is “an adequate or more than adequate number or amount of something…” This makes me wonder, what if these weren’t warring definitions, but more of an affirmation, like “plenty is enough and enough is plenty”?
Do you behave as if plenty were enough and enough were plenty?
All over the world people increasingly “save money” by buying huge quantities of everything they tend to use repeatedly at large warehouse stores. But does buying more than I need today really come from a place of plenty, or is it more fed by fear?
In the last decades of our mother’s life, her refrigerator’s “archeological” layers fascinated me as I advised her n’er-do-well friends to start with the 4-week-old Trader Joe’s cream cheese, salsa, bag of spinach, or package of turkey, and work their way up through the three, two, one week, and yesterday’s versions of the exact same products. She seemed to have an abject fear of running out of any one of these items. Yet, the worst-case scenario was really what she did pretty much every day: get in the car and go to the Trader.
Well past halftime in my own life, I surprise myself by starting to stockpile not only nonperishables (like toilet paper and dental floss) but essential all-American perishables like Tofutti Cream Cheese and Tofurkey Bratwurst. Although we don’t shop daily, my worst-case scenario is still pretty easy to weather.
The tiniest units of life know what I have forgotten: the cells that make up a human body hold no more energy than exactly what they need to get through the actual moment. Those cells form themselves into organs and blood and all the life systems to communicate with each other as the magnificence of the body.
What if this holiday season I behaved like there was enough and acted from faith in that principle instead of fear of going without? Every time I feel the impulse to eat more than I need, get up at 4am to buy a Black Friday gift because it is on sale, or give someone something they haven’t asked for, can I check in with myself to see if that impulse comes from fear rather than a sense of plenty and enough?
What would we do, how would we behave this holiday season, if we really believed that we have enough and enough is plenty?
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