Tag: scarcity

Discovering our Plenitude

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“When little people are overwhelmed by big emotions it’s our job to share our calm, not join their chaos.” L.R. Knost

Yesterday was our first day back to “life” after our short vacation to Whidbey Island. My toddler had to go back to daycare, my 5-year-old daughter had nothing planned because it was the first day of summer break at home and I tried to work while my nanny hung out with my daughter. After the little bit bumpy jarring of re-entry, we were all together last night and found ourselves gathered around the strawberry planter on the back patio. The warm weather and lack of pickers for few days meant it had about eight perfectly ripe berries.

My son, who at almost two years old doesn’t have a perfect picking technique and sometimes will eat the stem, was first to get his hands in there. Which led my five-year-old daughter to want to control the process. She started grabbing berries and instead of eating them, just holding them in her hands. She then grabbed one out of my son’s hands in an effort to pluck the stem out for him and he started to melt down. In good circumstances, he lets her do most everything and she’s quite supportive of him but in that moment, all the pains of the day descended and for everyone, THERE WASN”T ENOUGH!

I was trying to manage the scrum all the while observing the feeling of when life doesn’t go our way. When we get parked in our small spaces because something has been hard or tiring and suddenly there’s no energy to be expansive, to recognize that there’s enough. Everything centers on one moment when that ball in the gut feels like it needs to get fed or else.

This is one of the first times that I observed that happening collectively to us as a family. Probably not because it hasn’t happened before but because I wasn’t tuned in to see it. When it happens to me as an individual, if I can have a split second of awareness, one deep breath helps me start to break the pull of it. But the group dynamic flummoxed me until the cat jumped onto the fence and everyone looked up at the sound and it broke the tension.

I don’t like these moments. They pull me out of my happy place, or my I’m doing fine place, whichever I am at, and remind me of my humanity. When we break into a collective feeling of scarcity and panic, I feel like walking away. I heard Melinda French Gates once describe a family as a mobile and that moms often take on the job of keeping the whole system balanced. Sometimes I don’t feel like leading but the strawberry scrum is so ripe for a teaching moment, for me and for my children. It offers the chance practice awareness, distraction and feeding our possibility, expansiveness and calm and because I know they’ll be many more, also gratitude for the opportunity to remember we always have enough.

The Practice of Gratitude

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“Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life.” – Rumi

I read this excerpt from Lynne Twist’s book The Soul of Money and instantly identified with it:
“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is ‘I didn’t get enough sleep.’ The next one is ‘I don’t have enough time.’ Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of…. We don’t have enough exercise. We don’t have enough work. We don’t have enough profits. We don’t have enough power. We don’t have enough wilderness. We don’t have enough weekends. Of course, we don’t have enough money – ever. We’re not thin enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not pretty enough or fit enough or educated or successful enough, or rich enough – ever.

“Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds race with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thought and wake up to the reverie of lack… What begins as a simple expression of the hurried life, or even the challenged life, grows into the great justifications for an unfulfilled life.“

The one component that feels so scarce right now is me-time, time when I want to do what I want to do. Between having 2 young kids, working and trying to keep some order in the house that gets ripped into pieces every day as we are all stuck in here during the pandemic, I think it’s probably factually correct to say that my discretionary free-time is at an all-time low. BUT as I read the passage above, I realized that I don’t have to grieve that fact every day.

Lynne Twist, the author of the passage above, suggests we can believe that we are enough. Brene Brown, the University of Houston researcher who excerpted the passage above in her book The Gifts of Imperfection finds that her research shows practicing gratitude is what creates joy in our lives, no matter the circumstances. And she suggests that gratitude isn’t a passive thing that you espouse but something that truly needs to be practiced – like the piano.

It’s funny how easy it is to see in my own life once someone points it out to me. And I can see that my attitude of gratitude or belief that I’m enough can affect the lives of my children intimately. Because I have these years when they are young and still at home with me, even if it’s a little longer because of the pandemic, to set the tone by which they receive the world. In this week of Thanksgiving, it is such a perfect time to start some lasting traditions of naming the things we are grateful for every day.