Count 'em - Four

 I think if I ever start my own multi-national company (Fair Disclosure: I don't know what this company would do or how to start a company or any desire at all to start a company) that the official motto would be: "Making Big Things Out of Small Things."  We'd run a series of commercials that featured wry actors asking:"Do you have a mouse?  Would you like to make it into an elephant?  Give us a call!  We can do that!"  In select markets we'd show a married couple puttering about the house, getting along, until one of the partners would take offense at a seemingly harmless remark and respond a little more forcefully than the circumstances would seem to warrant.  We'd show the argument getting more heated and venomous until it blows up into a fully-fledged crisis.

On a side note I looked up the phrases "Buck Naked" and "Butt Naked" last night.  Buck Naked came first, believe it or not, and the origins are murky.  There was a lot of chatter about it having some Native American connection, the idea being that male deer normally run around without any clothes on.  Seems sketchy to me.

"The first requisites of an abundant life are the spiritual things: honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love.  Until you have these qualities, quantities of material things are of little real use to you."

The Four Absolutes: Honesty (Is it true or is it false?); purity (Is it right or is it wrong?); unselfishness (How will this affect the other person?); and love (Is it ugly or is it beautiful?)  These were benchmarks of behavior in the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous.  I particularly like the qualification for love: Beauty versus Ugliness.  That's simple and it's clean.

Here's another funny contradiction in the spiritual life that we pursue: that the longer we're sober, the longer we're on a spiritual path, the more stuff we seem to accumulate and the less important it is to us.  This is manifestly unfair.  The exact opposite is true, of course, in the realm of our personal relationships: they get better and better, more abundant, and we value them more.  But the stuff, the money, the houses?  We don't seem to attach as much importance to them as when we were drinking.