UNITED STATES—Get ready for another life-enhancer that will raise the quality of your existence and add grace and harmony to your days. Learn to proceed with the unshakable belief that there is always enough. This in the Hannukah effect, which takes it a notch further demonstrating there is more than enough.
I took the name for this concept from the Jewish holiday Hanukkah that commemorates the miracle of the one-day supply of oil at a temple under siege, miraculously lasting eight days.
How often the flow of life is interrupted and anxiety is caused by fearing there’s not enough! And here are some very mundane examples. Running late for work, not enough time, and I’d like to iron my shirt, but the water is very low in the iron. According to the Hanukkah effect, I can suspend all this anxious nonsense and iron away without stopping to refill it. More often that not, we’re going to successfully complete the task. In this case, it means going to work in a shirt that doesn’t look like a slept in it.
Here’s another example, parking meters. Parking meter’s often catch me short. First there’s dread over will there be a space available and then comes worry about lacking coins. See, I like to spend all my coins, and as I attempt to rid the coin pockets of all the coinage, I have gotten rid of all the silver I suddenly need,
The point is that when I approach parking meters, I am seized by anxiety over not having coins. But how many times do I arrive, not only to immediately find a space, but also there been time left on the meter? A lot of times. It’s amazing, but the human mind being what it is, mine at least, in the wake of this good fortune, starts to grind away on: is there enough time on the meter to do what I have to do?
So there we go back to this queasy quandary not enough time and money. I propose that by embracing this one simple steadfast confidence in there being always enough, more than enough–the Hanukkah effect will help us to endure with grace and stoicism the many crises that fruit so abundantly on the tree of life. Think of it: be at peace with how much there is to work with and be unenslaved by how much we THINK we should have.
There’s been a finding about people and how much money they need to be happy. It cuts across all races, educational levels and socio-economic strata. You ask people how much money they’d like to have to be happy, they answer two times what they currently have. Across the board: we yearn for twice what he have.
The Hanukkah effect, cultivated and applied, in areas of money, time and food as well, can help grant us peace, prosperity and slimness. Since we’re often being served twice the food we need, for example, we should learn to be contented with half of that heaping helping. And when it comes to purchasing supplies for house and home, we’re often buying many times what is needed and duplicating what we have already, but forgot about, as we’re in thrall to that gremlin within always demanding MORE, MORE, MORE.
The Hanukkah effect helps my put new items on my shopping list, but I now know to postpone purchasing them until investigating my hunch that I already have one on hand. Case in point: I needed a plug for an old lamp I’m fixing. I didn’t rush to the hardware store, and waiting for one to turn up. By gosh, there was an old perfectly usable plug in the bottom of my toolbox. Whoopee! A little miracle, with my apologies to the good folks at Tashman’s Hardware.
Humorist Grady Miller is the author of “Lighten Up Now,” a diet for the mind and body is available on Amazon.com.
