We are in the final days of Sukkot, a beautiful cosmic window when the energy of protection, mercy, kindness, and joy is available to us in abundance. It’s also a powerful reminder that a new beginning is available to us any time we choose it. Kabbalists call this energy Or Makif, meaning “Surrounding Light.”
Two Kinds of Light
To understand why that matters, it helps to know there are two kinds of Light. Our Internal Light is all the blessings we’ve already received and all the goodness we’ve already created. It’s beautiful, but it’s limited. It’s full from everything that came before, and if we try to pour new Light into a vessel that’s already full, it just spills over.
Surrounding Light is different. It’s limitless. It represents our potential, all of the amazing things we have to achieve and give but haven’t yet manifested in our reality. So let me ask you: how far do you think your Light shines? Six feet around you? To the end of the room? What if it could shine as bright as the sun? That is what Surrounding Light makes possible.
Why We Harvest Our Blessings in a Hut
Sukkot is known as the holiday of harvest. While that once referred to crops, today we understand it as a time to harvest our abundant blessings and gifts.
What I always find so interesting about kabbalistic traditions is just how smart they are. Rav Ashlag shared that “Once one has chosen an environment, one is subjected to it like the clay in the hands of the potter.” In other words, we typically become influenced by our environment instead of being the influence. During Sukkot, for example, we spend our time inside a sukkah, a temporary hut with a roof made of branches. Meals, conversations, and connections all happen there. Men and boys often sleep there.
How interesting, though, that if our environment shapes us so completely, we sit beneath the sukkah. We envelope ourselves in a humble tent of all places. But this is by design, a reminder that our blessings do not come from the material.
How Your Environment Shapes Your Thoughts
The field of environmental psychology studies how our surroundings change our thought patterns and, in turn, our behavior. The bed we wake up in, how we get to work, what kind of work we do, and who we interact with daily all influence what we think. Some estimates suggest we have thousands of thoughts every day, and that most of them are the same thoughts we had yesterday. Thoughts become our actions, and together, they create our reality. So changing our thoughts would clearly change our reality, right?
In one study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers measured the “Big Five” personality traits of a large group of German university students: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability. Some students stayed in Germany, while others studied abroad for at least a semester. When the study-abroad students were reassessed after returning home, they showed marked increases in Openness, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability.
When we change our surroundings, we change not only our thoughts and behaviors but even our personality. And those shifts don’t simply disappear the moment we come home.
You Don’t Need New Circumstances to Start Over
But let’s be honest. Most of us can’t move to another country every time we want to become someone new. Most of us are waking up in the same bed tomorrow, going to the same job, sitting across from the same people. So does that mean we’re stuck?
Absolutely not. Because the environment that matters most isn’t the one around us. It’s the one within us.
Kabbalah teaches that there are two forces in this world. There is the force of the Creator, the force of newness. And there is the force of ego, the desire to receive only for ourselves. That’s the force that makes things grow old. Relationships become old. Jobs become old. Our routines, our conversations, our thoughts all get stale when that’s the force we’re connected to. In every moment, through our actions and our consciousness, we choose which force we attach ourselves to.
When in Doubt, Choose Appreciation
So how do we get there? It starts with what we choose to see. Rav Ashlag taught that a negative person isn’t defined by their actions but by seeing the negative in everything. Stuck in traffic? “Why is this happening to me?” Everything is a big deal, everything is wrong. A positive person sees the Creator in all of it: the challenges, the chaos, and the blessings.
If we’re honest, most of us are a little of both. It’s like the movie Inside Out. Sadness keeps asking why everything went wrong, while Joy is busy trying to fix everything. We all have both voices. The question is which one gets the microphone.
This is where appreciation becomes a spiritual tool, not just a nice feeling. So often we focus on what we lack instead of what we have: our family, our friends, our health, even the shoes on our feet. Appreciation is how we change our environment from the inside. The walls stay the same, but we’re standing in a completely different room.
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus understood this better than almost anyone. He was born into slavery and lived with a leg that never healed. By every external measure, his environment was brutal. And yet he taught that nothing in life is intrinsically good or bad; what matters is how we view it. His circumstances couldn’t dictate his thoughts. Only he could.
Three Ways to Create a Fresh Start Today
Think about where your thoughts have been this week, this month, this year. Were they spent creating and connecting to what you want your life to look like? Or were they spent running from chaos and bracing for what might go wrong? For most of us, it’s the second one. That’s okay. Awareness is where it starts.
Here is what I want to offer you, during these last days of Sukkot and on any ordinary Thursday after:
Connect to the Light
Ask for the Light. Not the limited version of what you’ve already received, but the Surrounding Light, the version of you that you haven’t met yet.
Appreciate Your Blessings
Before you name what’s missing, name what’s here. Out loud, if you can.
Choose a New Thought
Catch the thought you had yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Then choose a different one.
In a few days, the sukkah will come down, and we’ll go back inside our familiar walls. But the Surrounding Light doesn’t leave with the hut. The power of renewal is available to us in any given moment. You don’t need new circumstances for a new beginning. You need a fresh thought.
Which thought will you choose?