The Challenges of the Abundance Mindset

I’ve had a couple brainsplosions during my fall break.  My life partner and I found an acceptable camping facility for both of us (it’s not his favorite thing to do, so it’s a team effort to find one).  Except it wasn’t just “agreeable,” as a Victorian elite might say.  It was transcendent, as a bisexual 18th century poet might say.

Lost River Hostel is a retreat that combines art, nature, and community to help people ground themselves and rediscover their purpose.  And it doesn’t shirk any of those pillars.  We slept in tree-nests and showered in the middle of the woods.  We danced around a fire.  We played music and painted.  There was as much staff as there were campers.  Each night I had soul-bearing conversations about art, spirituality, mental health, relationships, and purpose.  I shared my poetry and blog.  I got a few numbers.

I came back with my head in the clouds, ready to write twice as much, give hugs to strangers in the grocery store, the whole 8-fold path.  All I know is, I’ve needed this, and I’m going there again.  But it probably won’t feel as brick-face heroin as it did this first time.  It will have different staff, and I’ll have different connections, and I won’t be surprised at how wonderful it will be.  I’ll be expecting it, which will probably diminish it.

And then I realized something.  When I feel a new magic that hits a long-desired need, the excitement and adventure and mystery and lust fill my whole mind and body.  It’s what I did with two specific exes who had the longest lifespan in my head after the relationship ended.  I feel the rush, I pursue it with passion, romanticism, and anxious-attachment, and I usually get diminishing returns.

My therapist has talked to me about the difference between abundance mindset and scarcity mindset.  As most new ideas, it gathers lots of moisture in the air before it rains.  But I’m starting to understand how much my anxious-attachment is connected to a scarcity mindset.

One of the hardest things to believe about the abundance mindset is that it’s an accurate way of looking at the world.  It feels a bit like believing in God, if that is true for you (I remember the feeling when it was true for me), in that it requires faith outside of how you feel.  The world feels dark, lonely, and scarce most of the time.  How am I supposed to believe that it isn’t?  That it’s just the way I’m looking at it, regardless of how many angles I bend into for a different perspective?

For one thing, the isolation of our society challenges everyone to make meaningful connections.  Work may be social, but it certainly isn’t socially-meaningful, since it is bound by the necessities of goods, services, and general commerce.  Home and family give us purpose, safety, and intimacy, but it’s the same people everyday.  We need those relationships for our health, but it certainly doesn’t foster a feeling of social or emotional abundance.  I love my home, but sometimes I feel like a prisoner in it.  And I don’t even have kids.

Secondly, it takes work to build a network of friends in your thirties.  We have responsibilities and fatigue.  Our energy is so precious now.  Our weekends and weeknights are precious.  Everything is precious.  How do we foster a feeling of abundance when we’re running on empty?  How do we foster a feeling of abundance when, in order to spend an entire set of living hours with an adult outside our homes, both parties need to…

-fit each other’s schedule

-live close enough to be worth the drive

-make the other feel both safe and stimulated

-share at least some values

-be fun without really trying

-ideally enjoy at least one other type of activity besides passively watching TV

The amount of frontloading it takes to get a friendship off the ground in your thirties can only be fruitful if both people want it.  If just one of the above characteristics has a wrench thrown at it by any of life’s multitudes of variables, a friendship can be halted.  Many people ask me how I’m able to handle multiple romantic relationships, but honestly the harder thing for me to achieve is semi-consistent social time.

With the difficulty of building a social network, it’s so much easier for our minds to settle into simpler, one-dimensional explanations for our lack of dopamine.  I’m unlovable.  I’m boring.  People are boring.  I’m better than others.  Anarchy/Nihilism.  Drugs it is.

It’s easier to believe those things, than to do the hard thing, which is the following:

-Self-soothe until next time, when I text these people farther in advance to get on their calendars.

-Self-soothe until next time, when I use a different app for social connections that is more geared toward what I’m looking for.

-Self-soothe until next time, when I try a different person on the app.

-Self-soothe until next time, when I make a two-hour round trip to see an out-of-town friend.

-Self-soothe by texting an old friend I love, but not by mindlessly scrolling through something that will make me feel depleted.

Enduring the lows can feel like spiritual push-ups.  And that’s where I find Buddhist writings to be inspirational–that serenity in the dark is possible through flexibility, adjusted expectations, and protecting the core.

But I’ll be damned if it isn’t hard to believe that the world is abundant, whether it’s true or not.

Dear World,

I love you. Thank you for birthing me. Thank you for spending time with me. Thank you for giving me gifts that I can explore and play with and connect to the past, present, and future with. Thank you for being the hands that will take me when me time is done.

Thoughts while listening to the new Paramore album This is Why

Andrew, what band is this?

No it’s not.

This is not vengeful straight-girl punk rock.  This is not what you hear on the radio before Maroon 5. 

This is complicated, rich, textured, jazzy, funky, and relevant as fuck.

This is a concept album telling the story of our lives.  The Great-American-Novel, except it’s the Great-American-Album.

A few hours ago, I was sipping ice water after an indulgent taco dinner with brand new friends.  We were doing a polite amount of political commiseration…which has been happening a lot since 2016, whatever happened then.  The increasing violence in Israel hit my new friend hard.

“What gives you hope?” she asked in the kind of bold honesty that made us instant friends.

I’m not a parent, and teaching is not the reason I wake up in the morning (though it is the reason I wake up at 6:15…hissss).  There’s one reason I don’t run my car over a cliff every day, and that’s the act of creation.  Feeling my leaves bloom in places where I was told not to, where others laugh due to an inability to see the layers and shades.  Seeing other leaves bloom.  Contributing to the ever-expanding mosaic that oblivion stretches to hold.

“Music is so good now,” I said.  “Funk isn’t just funk.  It’s jazz.  It’s pain.  It’s a goddamn ecosystem of sound.”  I was never even into funk.  But then Tame Impala happened, and I started paying attention to the texture and movement of funk.

And then Knower broke my brain the way any woman who talks to Ben Gibbard breaks him (dripping into his heart through a pinhole).

And then DOMi & JD BECK took me on a waterslide through ethereal modulations so seamlessly, I closed my eyes and believed in gardens again.

It isn’t just funk either.  When I think of Sleep Token’s Take Me Back to Eden, Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter, BoyGenius’s The Record, DOMi & JD Beck’s Not Tight, Caroline Polachek’s Desire, I Want to Turn into You, Knower’s Knower Forever, and the face-brick juggernaut that is Paramore’s This is Why, I’m reminded of how adversity tends to evoke the greatest music of all time.

Russian symphonies from the WWII era are the best symphonies.  Shostakovich’s Leningrad is unmatched.  Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.  Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances.  

And then there’s Mozart, composer of over 800 musical pieces, while Austria was going through The Seven Year’s War, The Third Silesian War, War of Bavarian Succession, and the reign of “Enlightened Despotism.”

Do you know any symphonies from contexts of prosperity and stability?  No, you don’t.  Because there’s no reason to write them.

One actual thing I agree with boomers on is America’s golden years of music.  It is scientific fact that American music from the 60s and 70s is peak.  My Gen Z students know Jimmy Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane.  They don’t know Hansen, and they never will.

So when I think about the fact that so much global power lies in the hands of lazy assholes who haven’t evolved beyond “shit, fuck, and murder,” I plug into sound.  I feel the deep wounds of the earth and its children sing to me, and I feel a collective pulse.

Yeah, we’re not gonna make it as a species, I think that’s pretty clear.  But the end isn’t here yet.  There are still many waves ahead.  If the economy and human rights violations ever calm down again (it’d be nice to stop killing the planet too, but one can only dream), I hope we experience a musical cool-down reminiscent of the 80s.  There was a brash audacity to that synth.  There was an ease with the euphoric frivolity of “Billy Jean” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”

Obviously, the 80s weren’t “chill” either, if you talk to any gay person who lived through the period.  But that’s the decade I entered the world.  And I’d love to leave it during a similar wave of music, going into that good night with neon veins and big hair. 

The Power of Ritual

 A few weeks ago, I went to my brother’s wedding with inadequate emotional preparation.  I thought, “it’ll be cool.”  Like most families with real pasts and real scars, we all get a little nervous before reunions.  But every single one of us came with faith, love, and our best selves.  It was far more poignant than I’d anticipated.  

Everyone got up to the mic sharing stories of what the bride or groom were like when they were kids.  Their awkwardness, competitiveness, fierce curiosity, sense of adventure, and love of science.  There was so much love to share that other people were talking us down from the mic.

This couple had thrown a party.  You’ve never seen so many white people of all generations dance their hearts out.  Even people who didn’t know how to dance were moving their bodies to the rhythm.  At one point my mom and I simply high-fived each other with both hands to the beat, with nothing but joy.

And it wasn’t just a good time.  It was a catalyst for healing.  At one point, I was joking around with the person next to me that I was going to dance inappropriately.  My parents were in front of me.  I said, “I’m just joking.  I’m not going to murder my parents tonight.”  My Mom turned around and said, “Lis, you just be you.”

I proceeded to cry for the next ten minutes.  No one knows how special that moment was, or how many years of reaching we’d both done to get there.  

Everyone deserves this type of celebration, whether or not they find someone resembling a “soulmate.”  Everyone deserves their loved ones to make a trip, dress up, read them speeches about how much they love them, and eat cake.  God knows lots of people who shouldn’t get married do, just because the wedding is such a beautiful and validating experience.

There’s something transcendent about a good ritual.  It connects us to our ancestors.  We are choosing to perform the same symbolic actions to communicate powerful intentions, even if those intentions have had different cultural contexts or stakes.  Like the way monogamous marriage used to be about land, children, and dowries.  The changes that birth control and working women threw into the milieu.  

Through all that, we still fall in love and desire each other.  We still need a trusted friend to fall crying into on a hard day, and make us laugh when we need it.  I looked at the faces of my brother and new sister-in-law at the front of the room, and saw millions of faces behind them, millions of eyes looking at each other with anticipation and trust.  A pulse of eternity was in the room.

But rituals should also evolve with us, like everything else.  Right now, you can have as many weddings and divorces as you want.  You can live in a commune with seven lovers.  You can live by yourself in complete wholeness.  And you can have a party whenever, and for whatever reason suits you.  Symbolic acts and tradition aren’t the only way to feel connected to history and humanity, but if you find it as meaningful and meditative as I do, it’s important to make it your own.

An act as simple as lighting a fire and singing a song can connect you to millions of ancestors.  It’s their gift to you.  So do it whenever you need to feel their presence.