True Abundance
I’m still thinking about the documentary Planet of the Humans. It’s a film that is going to stay with me for a long time. It puts a lot of things into perspective and enabled me to reconcile how I can be Pro-Alberta/Canadian Oil & Gas and still care very deeply about the planet. Over the last few years I was feeling like there wasn’t a place for someone who was both (even though there is an argument that the vast majority of Albertans are both but that’s for another post)
The movie got me thinking about abundance. If you’ve read The Secret, or any book of that nature, you’ve read that the universe is infinitely abundant. But you might be left wondering how we can live on planet earth with its limited resources, that we are depleting at an alarming rate, and still believe the universe is abundant? Our culture has been become so drenched in consumerism that we’ve lost sight of true abundance. Abundance is about possibilities, ideas, feelings of fulfillment and the feeling of having enough. It is not nor was it ever meant to mean having a whole lot of stuff. In fact, have you ever purged your closet and felt MORE relaxed, MORE open, with MORE space? Ironically, we often feel more abundance when we let go of something.
I used to really love shopping. As many women in their 20s, I spent way too much time and money worrying about buying things that were new and in-style. It actually makes me cringe to think about how careless I was with money in my youth. And what’s more embarrassing is that it took meeting my husband to really ‘get it’. I owed a bit of money on my line-of-credit when we first started dating and my husband told me point blank that there was no way we were getting married if I was in debt. I was slowly paying it off, but he made me double what I was putting into it and I had it paid off within a few months. This isn’t a story about a man telling me what to do but rather a story about someone who cared about me helping me learn an important lesson. It wasn’t until I started to truly live within my means I felt more abundance in my life.
It’s been almost 2 months since we’ve been living in this new Covid world and it’s been in incredible time to observe what matters most and how little we need to survive. It’s not to say there aren’t a bunch of things I miss and can’t wait to do again (playgrounds, the Zoo, restaurants, family happy hours, and hugging round out my top 5). But it’s a great time reflect and decide what we can leave behind. What were you doing before that wasn’t serving you? Were you feeling a lack of abundance? Maybe you need to get rid of or let go of something because what you’ll gain in return will leave you feeling a new level of abundance.
Each week I look for a couple images to go with my post and when I searched abundance this week the images ranged from pictures of money, to nature, to bunches of carrots, to wide open spaces, to people with their arms out to surrender. Not one photo of someone with a bunch of stuff. Sometimes we all need a reminder about what true abundance means. For me it’s about appreciated what we have and striving to be better. And remembering that abundance is something we experience internally and not something that comes from the accumulating stuff.