A little note about plenishing

I heard in a speech one time that a person is going into a storm, coming out of a storm, or in the eye of a storm.  One should never be complacent since change is about to happen or since the eye of the storm means that whatever has been achieved is short-lived until the next storm arrives.

That philosophy is a little pessimistic for my liking.  It is true that life has its ups and downs, but I'm not so sure about the analogy to storms.  Life is really complex.  We have a lot to do with how our circumstances happen around us, but at the same time, no one has complete control of circumstances.  People act unilaterally.  Problems arise that have ramifications no matter how they are solved.  Those ramifications influence the current situation, and life changes or is altered slightly.  But not everything that happens is a storm.  On some occasions accomplishments materialize, not problems, and those accomplishments influence the current situation, and life changes or is altered in some way.

No matter what the circumstances of life bring, however, one word is true about how we act as humans - plenish.  We are in the business of plenishing our lives during every one of its phases or through every change or alteration.  Plenish you say?  Right.  It's English, well, it is if you believe that what the Scots speak is English.  After the French defeated the British in 1066 A.C.E., they introduced the verb replenir to the English language.  The British changed the pronunciation and, therefore, its spelling to replenish.  At the time, the prefix re- didn't mean "again," it was an intensifier, so replenish didn't mean "to fill again," it meant "to fill completely."  Plenish, therefore, meant "to fill."  The people around London decided not to use the word much without a prefix, which later came to mean "again," which is why Americans don't use plenish either.  But, those darned Scots were too far north of London to care much what Londoners thought, so before one can replenish something it must be plenished in the first place.  Leave it to the Scots...

That's the beauty of life, though.  We get to plenish it during every phase.  What we plenish it with is up to us regardless of how the circumstances came about.  And it is exactly this thought that makes me able to smile regardless, to answer yes, everything's fine, and to be contented enough to be happy rather than miserable.  Certainly there are degrees of happiness, but there is an even keel in disaster or in ecstasy because we get to plenish our lives.