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Posts Tagged: Sustainable Abundance

Lighten Your Life

Life is not an ever-growing collection of successes and failures. It’s not a bag of decisions, opinions, mistakes, or mishaps, or a rucksack full of bricks that you’re condemned to drag through the sludges of time.

Life is more like the stroke of a paintbrush, emptying itself of all that clings to it and refining its precision with the passage of time. It’s the vessel that exists to hold water, effortlessly releasing its contents to the next destination.

It’s important to remember that not every destination can be reached by a well-paved path: some destinations require taking flight. When it’s time to fly you just can’t fill a giant bag with everything in your life and expect that plane to soar.

If where you’re going is important, decide what really matters and take responsibility for your freedom. Hold tight to everything and everyone that will support your voyage and let go of everything else. Embrace your essence and when there is doubt let love lighten your load: a life painted in love outweighs a voyage completed unprepared.

Let Go

If you don’t let go, you cannot receive. To receive, you must first give what you have. You must release everything you’re holding onto and allow that space to be replaced with the present. All that you need is right here. Everything that feels missing is just waiting for a place to go, a space to occupy, a home to hold it. Empty yourself. Let go.

Think Sustainable

My mouse hovered over the “Confirm Order” button as I glanced back at the order total: $112.02 with shipping. I took another look at the item description, reading it over and over as if waiting for a voice to start reassuring me that this is what I needed.

The pressure between my finger and the mouse increased. Should I press it? Will I regret spending this money? How will I justify this purchase when I do my monthly expense report?

Relaxing my finger, I looked up from the laptop and stared at the trees outside. What would be the sustainable choice? What would be the responsible choice?

If I replicated my choice across all seven billion people on the planet and then amplified those seven billion choices by several generations, would I be left with something sustainable or something that contributed to an unsustainable future? Continue reading →

Voting for Poverty

Look into her eyes. Look at the expression her mouth makes, the red marks left by tears on her cheeks, the grit underneath her nails. Now tell me that cup of coffee I was drinking is somehow more important.

Every time you buy something you don’t need or spend time in the pursuit of a selfish goal, you’re placing a vote that says you’d rather see people suffer than sacrifice your own wants and desires.

You can push the starving children out of your head and tell yourself that you’d do more if you could. You can remind yourself that you’re a good person and that you have your own problems to deal with.

But none of that changes the fact that there are 2 billion people living on the same planet as you, sharing the same resources, breathing the same air, and yet surviving on a standard of living far below what you would consider humane.

None of that changes the fact that there are 17,000 children dying every single day from preventable causes.

There are no subtle exceptions. The coffee I’m drinking right now is a vote for poverty because I wasted $2 to satisfy my craving for caffeine instead of using that money to feed a hungry family for an entire week. Continue reading →

Reaching Out to Mother Nature

Baby Bananas in Moodabidri, Karnataka, India

Last week my nephew celebrated his first birthday and over the weekend I attended two birthday parties for him. I watched as he opened numerous presents and found himself surrounded with more toys than he could possibly know what to do with.

He played with each toy for a few moments until he seemed to become so overwhelmed by everything around him that he reached up for his mother (my sister) with open arms. The abundance was too much. He just wanted simplicity.

It was easier to return to the familiar comfort of his mothers’ arms than it was to indulge in the excess of toys surrounding him.

I realized that like my nephew being surrounded with toys, we often surround ourselves with more than we know what to do with and, as a result, we become physically and psychologically overloaded.

Stress, feelings of isolation, boredom, a missing sense of purpose and direction, confusion, self-doubt, a lack of enthusiasm — all of these are evidence of living with more than we can handle. Continue reading →

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