Sunday, June 5, 2016

More vs Enough vs Adaptability & Resourcefulness Part II



(For Heaven’s sake) to manifest the spark of the divine within (each of us)
Judaic thought

QUESTION: What is ‘more’ useful to the creation process & its derivatives: the Yes FOR the NO; the No FOR the Yes; the Yes AND No): MORE or ENOUGH ?

DEFINITIONS:

ENOUGH: healing personal financial anxiety, puttin’ money (the current currency) in its place, to transcend, connect & align to one’s signification/assignment – what one is meant to do & meant to be – with enough to live for & enough to live on

MORE: a never-ending Sisyphusian test of worthiness, usually leading to increased personal financial anxiety, less and a Sense of ‘LACK’ (S.O.L.) as ‘there is never quite enough’ Note: More, Better, Now has a habit of becoming Less, Worse, Later.
            .
            Ironically, both MORE and ENOUGH may be contraindicative (counteract)  to the   creation/destruction – yes FOR no, no FOR yes, yes AND no process..

But what I do have are a very particular set of skills
Liam Neeson in ‘Taken’

            Each of us has not only a spark of the divine within to manifest but also a portion (chalek) to discover, develop, & materialize . This portion/trait may be revealed & cultivated as a particular set of skills or remain buried within. In addition, most of us have exhibited – but give little value to let alone monetize - our adaptability and resourcefulness in the face of the resistance of NO’s (difficulties, challenges, and in particular financial obstacles). If anything,  we tend to minimize – actually devalue these  YES capabilities – these particular set of skills – in terms of our ‘net worth-iness’ preferring to believe in the ‘current currency’ (money).

To have more doe not mean to be more
Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Sabbath

            In the past, at ENOUGH Personal Financial Life Planning workshops, I would often ask clients or participants for a show of hands relative to the questions:

·         Have you incurred difficulties and especially challenges at one time or another in your life.?
·         Did you have overcome those difficult situations?

Invariably every attendees raised their hands.
When I would ask for how many put – monetized – their adaptability and resourcefulness on their net worth – balance sheets, I got incredulous looks (and no hands). After all, other than inheritance, isn’t it, in great part, the individual’s adaptability and resourcefulness which helped to ‘create’ the ‘financial net worth?’

Who is rich?
The one who is appreciates what he has…
(Talmud—Avot 4:1)

And the Chinese variation per Tao Te Ching, ‘He who is rich? He who knows what enough is.”‘
 And yet, the  focus is on LACK, its derivative Acquisition (Cain in Hebrew) and the subderivative MORE for redemption, after life insurance, and or just palliation with higher and higher dosages required to offset this LACKtose intolerance. The MORE idol becomes both the yes for fear of the no.
The chalek, developed inside out, when paired with meaning IN one’ life furthers creation (climbing the mountain – the YES) and even creative destruction (strip mining (the NO)) both in dialectic tension as:

  • pressure on coal is required to yield a diamond,
  • the agitation of sand on the clam creates the pearl,
  • clothes don’t get clean without an agitator in the washing machine
  • no one likes an alarm clock

The NO for YES is sharpened by the chalek when paired with meaning IN one’s life and therefore ‘being fruitful and adding.’

Still, devaluing our resourcefulness, adaptability, and chalek we complain. Per a Judaic story, a man complains to God, ‘Almighty this life is a terrible, challenging, tough destructive, unfair (imitating a progressive Democrat?) tough world – can’t you send someone to help?
The Almighty replied, ‘I did. I sent you.’

A Story:

            A dog with a bone in his mouth looking into a river sees his reflection and mistakes it for a dog with a larger bone. Discarding his own bone, he jumps into the river to battle and seize the larger bone from the other dog. After giving up in futility, he emerges sometime later from the river with no bone and his fur matted for his efforts.
MORE  versus ‘ENOUGH 
The LESSon – The boner.      

            MORE tends to divert attention away from chalek development and  toward acquisition of ‘an enough’ which is always just ‘a little MORE’  – just in case.’ In addition, the never quenched thirst of the Sisyphisian MORE is increasingly adding boogie men to the equation. Solve threat #1 to MORE and real or typically imagined threat #2 is promoted as the  MORE  ‘The Rat-e of Return’ hamster wheel continues to spin.

When one reinforces & pairs chalek to meaning IN their life – then ‘ENOUGH  to live for ENOUGH  to live on’ increases the probability of manifested creation. And yet, ENOUGH  sans dovetailing with one’s chalek and meaning IN there life has a habit of recycling to eventually MORE, and MOREonic behavior with the collateral damage being the unmanifested yes FOR no and no FOR yes. Here is the sequence of  this ENOUGH  returning to MORE:

  • Get ‘a cushion just in case,’
  • Secure the means to the ends and move the ends apart,
  • Escape ‘meaning – the will to meaning’ by doing one’s someday things (throwing pots in Vail or rearranging their spouses’ spices in alphabetical and size order –(I kid you not – these are real examples)
  • With spouses complaining ‘for better or worse but not for lunch’ in gradations  to adventuresome capital forays begin rationalized as “I can make more which I can redirect to good causes,’ or
  • running for political office – to make a difference.

So with ENOUGH  uncoupled to meaning IN one’s life & one’s chalek, – the spark of the divine within like MORE remains buried unmanifested under developed and the process of continuing the completing of one’s incompletions (the soul curriculum) is held back – and failing to be fruitful and multiply rather than skipping grades for creation: Yes FOR No and or No FOR Yes.

The journey is not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes
Proust

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