‘A cheerfully likeable manifesto for lifestyle change.’ – Guardian
‘A liberating and wry take on the treadmill of modern life.’ – Daily Mail
‘Instructional and inspirational.’ – The Times
Book blurb: For millions of years, humankind has used a brilliantly successful survival strategy. If we like something, we chase after more of it: more status, more food, more info, more stuff. These days, we in the Western World have more of everything than we can ever use, enjoy or afford, but we’re still chasing. We’re burning through the planet’s ecology and it’s leaving us sick. tired, overweight, angry and in debt. In ENOUGH, John Naish acts as a guinea pig for neuromarketing gurus, samples all-you-can-get buffets and rifles through the unused gems people chuck out, in order to explore how we get hooked on ‘more’ and how, through adopting the art of ‘enoughness’, we can break free from this wrecking cycle.
Winner of a 2008 IVCA Clarion Award for environmental book of the year
Managed to get a copy of ‘Enough’ by John Naish from Borders. As I’m all for simple living, it’s a subject of interest. What’s more, I’m curious about the context in which my quote appeared in. It’s the opening quote of chapter 8. Below is an excerpt from that chapter, which briefly mentioned the benefits of Buddhist meditation. Will read the entire book later.
I was expecting the book to have the plain white cover (see https://moonpointer.com/new/2009/07/time-for-enough) but to my surprise, the version at Borders had an alternative one – that is much more colourful and complex (as above). It made me wonder… Was the original cover of ‘Enough’ not ‘enough’? And is the new cover too busy, or just right? Different strokes for different folks I guess. From a marketing point of view, the plain cover might not be attention-grabbing enough, though its intention was to be so. How so? Because the literary market is getting flooded with minimalist designs! There are ‘enough’ of them to render another super plain cover… well… plain. Borders was also selling the one with the plain cover. As I held it, I thought of getting it, as another souvenir of sorts. Then I thought – one Enough is ‘enough’! Let’s cut to excess ego trip and purchase of too much paper. (The book size is bigger too.) It costs $10 more than the new cover. A case of money not ‘enough’ too!
With thanks to Yega, here is the Chinese translation of the quote below, as requested by the Chinese translator of ‘Enough’ – 知足之时，就是丰足之时。问题是，我们往往是反过来去思维，总以为丰足以后，才能知足。(The original article from which the quote appeared in is ‘Are You Investing Enough in “Enoughness”?’, which can be seen at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/zeph/message/853 It was also published in an issue of the ‘Nanyang Buddhist’ magazine.) Here is the excerpt from ‘Enough‘:
8 | NEVER-Enoughs
The moment we are content, we have enough.
The problem is that we habitually think the other way round:
we assume we will be content only when we have enough.
– Shen Shi’an, editor of The Daily Enlightenment newsletter
“We have also invented another new way to divorce ourselves from the eternal now: multitasking. Anyone who thinks of themselves as a bright, ambitious player now multitasks all the time. How else are we going to achieve everything? However, studies show how the human brain isn’t quite built for multitasking. It needs time to shift gears between jobs, so the more switching you do – between, say, talking on the phone, reading e-mail, and working on the computer – the less proficiently you tackle any of it. Havard psychiatrists blame the multitasking trend for a new malaise that they call pseudo-attention deficit disorder. They say workers can’t buckle down to long-term projects because they crave the physical buzz of being distracted by new data (the dopamine kick we saw in chapter one). There is an old Buddhist term for this state: monkey mind. You have monkey mind when your thoughts race around like a monkey scurrying through treetops. Monkey mind skims life’s jittery surfaces, failing to enjoy its minutiae or interconnectedness. It doesn’t have time for things such as gratitude or compassion.
So how do we settle our heads into the rich, rewarding, eternal now, while all around are monkey-minding theirs? Emerging scientific evidence shows how the simple mental practice of daily meditation can significantly enhance our perception of the present. And if we really do need to multitask, meditating can also boost our brain’s ability to attend to several things at the same time. MRI scans of meditating monks at the Dalai Lama’s monastery in Dharamsala, India, offer one reason why the practice leaves people feeling settled. The scans show that experienced meditators have much higher levels of electrical activity in the left prefrontal lobe of their brains, an area associated with positive emotional states such as resilience, contentment and optimism. This heightened stimulation also swamps activity in the right prefrontal lobe, which is linked with negative emotions such as fear and anxiety.” – John Naish