“It’s all fine and good to just say ‘reframe relationships from a model of scarcity to one of abundance,’ but dude, HOW?” he says.
I nod. “Telling people to switch from a scarcity to an abundance mindset is just like walking past a bakery and saying, ‘Just bake that dessert in the window.’ Sure, the occasional person with the right expertise can whip it up no problem. But for people without that background, it’s like ‘gee whiz, thanks, that’s a great suggestion. I uhh… have literally no idea how to do that.’”
“Mmm,” he says. “And to be honest, what I’m looking for really isn’t that common. So there’s a bit of scarcity baked into the cake. True, I don’t buy into the idea that you have one soulmate and that’s it. That just doesn’t make any sense in probabilistic terms.”
“Right,” I say, nodding. We both have enough of a background in statistics to be acutely aware that extremely improbable things happen pretty much constantly.
“But my standards are pretty high. What I’m looking for isn’t easy to find.”
I nod. “I think the important part here is that you don’t let the fear of never finding it make it so that you approach the search maladaptively. I think that’s all it means.” I pause. “Well, that and you don’t let the idea of what you _don’t _have ruin what you _do _have.” I direct him once again to Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly. “What you need to feel isn’t abundance. It’s the feeling that you’re enough. Read that book. I mean it.” I remind him that I reread it myself from time to time.
“Thanks Page,” he replies. “You’re always helpful.”
“The counterapproach to living scarcity is not about abundance. In fact, I think abundance and scarcity are two sides of the same coin. The opposite of ‘never enough’ isn’t abundance or ‘more than you could ever imagine.’ The opposite of scarcity is enough.”
-Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
*