It's harvest season on the ol' urban homestead, and the food is coming in faster than we can handle it (almost!). Tomatoes, summer squash, peppers, basil, basil and more basil. Two apple trees will probably be ready to go by the weekend, and the grapes a few days after that. Our CSA box comes every week on Tuesday, filled with good things from our community supported farmers, Jeremy and Shae East. And the temptation to buy vast quantities of all the gorgeous produce at the Farmer's Market or at Cochran's is almost irresistable.
And then some very good friends offered us peaches---as many as five bushels! Emboldened by our earlier efforts, we said, 'We'll take two!' (We actually did look it up in advance, so we knew that two bushels is 100 lbs, by the way!) And so for the last two evenings, we've been putting up the peaches. Peach jam, canned peaches, peach pie filling... We are about a quarter of the way through the second bushel. That's a lot of time with busy hands and floating mind, and it set me to thinking about the lessons that can be learned from abundance.
We make a religion in this country of believing that lessons can be learned from adversity, from want, from loss. 'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger', and so on. But there are also lessons to be learned from abundance, from having enough, from feeling that you are in a position of strength and safety.
When faced with 100 pounds of peaches I stop spending a lot of time trying to carefully carve out the bad spots. Instead, I just whack 'em off, and move on to the next peach. This broadens my view, so that I'm not continually distracted by the infinitesimal details. I see where I'm are going---I need to peel, core and cut 25 cups of peaches tonight, preferably before the water in the canner has come to a boil! And this results in a waste of maybe 5%, (based on the volume in the compost heap versus the volume in the canning jars). Insufficiency is a trap that sets me worrying about getting every last little bit of peach into the canner. And sometimes I lose more in opportunity cost than I gain. I certainly lose sight of the big picture!
Which brings me to opportunity costs. The first time I ever heard of this was when someone told me that they lose money every time they stop to pick up a dime from the sidewalk, because they could have earned more than that by using that time to talk to someone and make a deal. This is a particularly snotty thing to say, really, but it introduced me to the idea that if you are fully engaged, every minute, you have no room to look at the things you are not doing, and see if those are better things to do. An abundance of time, and a sufficiency of security, makes this kind of thinking possible, and makes it possible to try on different futures, to imagine how they might fit. Abundance gives you the emotional space to ask, 'What if the world were different than it is?', 'What if I had 100 pounds of peaches? What would I do with them?'
The most important lesson of abundance is that it's ok to take risks. If I have 100 pounds of peaches in my kitchen, I'll try adding cinnamon to the jam. I'll swap out ingredients and spices. I'll try something I've never had, just to see... maybe I will love it! Learning to look at the possible outcomes, judge the likelihood of success, and then take a leap, is a lesson of abundance. It's a lesson of safety, and security, and feeling like I have enough, and maybe even more than enough. Insufficiency makes this kind of risk-taking impossible, because I feel even a small risk is too big.
Insufficiency is, in part, a mindset. It's a way of thinking about things as though there is not enough to go around. As though I'll never get what you need, and so I have to protect what I have against all comers. But that mindset keeps me from saying, 'Heck, yes, I'd like 100 pounds of peaches! Who knows WHAT I'll do with them?! Anything could happen!' because I'm so busy fretting over what I haven't got that I can't imagine taking the risk of trying something totally outrageous.
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