Sylvester the Cat. ( https://youtu.be/_Q3yEqogTQk )
Hear his voice inside your head.
Now say the word “plethora.”
Now there is a comical word if I ever heard one.
Plethora.
You have to watch for spittle when you say it out loud.
It means that there is a large or excessive amount of something. Like a plethora of ideas. Or a plethora of lies.
Originally, plethora wasn’t about quantities. It was medical. It meant someone had too much blood. Their body overfilled. They got swollen. They turned flushed and red with excess. They had too much fluid.
But somewhere along its merry way, the word turned from the medical world and into everyday life. Now it describes a lot of “something”. It could be anything. A plethora of everything, everywhere, all at once.
And that might be the thing we should see. Because abundance always sounds like a gift. Like a blessing. It seems like it might be a good problem to have.
But abundance can also have a blurred meaning. When someone has everything, and when every little thing is available? Well. Sometimes reality gets lost. The sight of what is essential gets lost. When options multiply endlessly for people, they have a tendency to forget what it means to have nothing.
The older meaning of plethora reminds us that more is not always better. Excess doesn’t necessarily mean better. It might cause us to lose sight of things.
And yet, abundance isn’t really the enemy, I don’t think. The trick is recognizing how much we truly have. And in seeing that abundance, we then should be grateful for all the goodness that surrounds us. If we are so lucky to have this. Or that.
Maybe the best part of everything is learning. Learning about the balance. Learning about the gifts. Being thankful for “enough.” And then, even more.
And the spitting. When you say the word, plethora.
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“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”
— Hans Hofmann
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“Enough is a feast.”
— Buddhist proverb
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“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
— Henry David Thoreau
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“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
— Leonardo da Vinci
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