“So before we go any further, I want my ends.” Everlast ‘Ends’

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house: neither shalt thou desire his wife, nor his servant, nor his handmaid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his.” Exodus, Old Testament

“Greed is the lack of confidence of one’s own ability to create.” – Vanna Bonta

So where is it? Where’s that abundance? Is it lacking because we didn’t say the right mantra? Is it missing due to our inability to create an effective vision board? Did it take a detour because we xyz’d when we should have abc’d? It can feel impossible to thread our way through all the theories and plans. Just what type of abundance lies where we are aiming our focus? It must be a type of abundance we don’t already have.

Our abundance is right here. It’s already ours.

Why do we ignore what we have and pursue what others have? Part of it, I believe, lies in our tendency to treat the familiar with disdain. No one thing, or person, can meet all of our needs. When we feel a need that is unmet with our current abundance, we assign negatives to that form of abundance, and place it in a lower value compared to other types of abundance. When we do that we lessen our own value and the value of our effort.

Example: Person A has an abundance of intellect and knowledge but needs material abundance in order to eat. In order to meet Person A’s basic survival needs, their having intellectual/knowledge abundance will seem much less important than having material wealth, unless they can attain access to material wealth using their already existing abundance.

We take abundance to mean that it exists outside of us. That it is akin to a natural resource, to be found somewhere out there. That it might take work to find it but when we do find it, it just flows. “Find your passion and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Treasuring our abundance means work; not treasuring our abundance also means work.

We have to work, even after recognizing our abundance, because no one person has all the types of abundance that they need to live a decent life. Whether we’re the billionaire hoarding material wealth or the intellectual hoarding their knowledge wealth, we’re still working. Even if it’s just to maintain the hoard against entropy. Once again though, there’s only so much abundance we can comprehend. We can keep adding to imaginary, or symbolic, heaps but it becomes meaningless to our reality, and will eventually end up in the dustbin of contemptible familiarity.

The freedom lies in recognizing our abundance for the gift it is, and using it to meet our needs and sharing the excess with those around us. If we don’t value our abundance and work, we also won’t appreciate it and it will head into that dustbin filled with familiarity. That’s when we start looking at our neighbor’s field with envy.