plenty
It’s easy to point the finger. To be judgmental. To call yourself a victim, a martyr. To declare someone else the villain. It’s three fingers of an aged liquor. Its righteous indignation served neat. It warms the wound, and dulls the pain, but it also clouds the way you see things. Makes the room spin feverishly the more of it you drink.
“We are all savages inside”, Cheryl Strayed says, “We all want to be the chosen, the beloved, the esteemed.” We all want to be the hero. To be the star in some capacity. We all want the spotlight. To be showered in roses and accolades during a standing ovation while on center stage. But when we don’t get it, when it goes to someone we’ve decided is less deserving, it’s easy to get jealous and petty and shitty. Easy to have our asses handed to us by the one-two punch of “why them?” and “why not me?”
I fell prey to this often. Sometimes I still do.
“[O]ur early experiences and beliefs about our place in the world inform who we think we are and what we deserve and by what means it should be given to us”, Strayed explains. My childhood and burgeoning adult years were charmed by most standards. My basic needs were met. My wants were catered to. There were no traumas. No great cataclysmic tragedies.
I married young. Excelled at my job. Climbed the ladder. Rose through the ranks. Got arrogant and entitled in the process of achieving things. I got angry and bitter when someone I knew started accomplishing more than me.
The universe had gone easy on me, and I mistook that good fortune as evidence that the world owed me something. Really, it was just waiting for the right time to fuck my shit up completely.
After years of devastating layoffs. A messy divorce. Unspeakable legal and financial troubles, I’ve learned humility the hard way. I’ve learned that luck, both good and bad, arrives capriciously, and rarely does it have anything to do with what one deserves to receive.
I’ve learned to be persistent and resilient. I’ve learned that success is something fluid. It can take on different forms and shapes. It can mean different things depending on the time and the place and your needs. But most of all I’ve learned to believe in abundance more than scarcity, “that there is enough for all of us”, as Strayed says. That when one of us wins we all do. That all the courage you could ever ask for is found in the encouragement you’re offering. That the utmost steadiness you could ever hope to garner is in the love and support you give away. And “that being genuinely happy for someone who got something you hope to get”, Strayed says, “makes you genuinely happier too.”
May your grief be gathered with gentleness and gratitude.
May your heart always know what enough means.
May plenty always find you softly, in what you give as well as in what you receive.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
I have felt the genuine happiness that others gave me when I was new to the space and I vowed to always give it back. Such a beautiful exchange... also, when someone does something awesome they make it possible, proof it can be done and I will always celebrate that!
To believing in abundance over scarcity -- thank you for the vulnerable read Duane.
Hard lessons we all have to go through for sure, Duane—your story sounds particularly hardcore.
I’ve come to think of success not as a state of being but as an ideal state of doing. (The pop psychology way people like to depict this is with that flow state chart that often gets shared around, but really it’s just the gift of being able to apply ourselves to something challenging and meaningful.) In a world that pushes ease and convenience as ultimate virtues, it can be difficult to sustain, but I think doing so does make us happier.