Abundance in the Unknown

What is Revealed in Our Unknowing?

Hi beloved friends,

I am spiraling.

In the last few months, there has been a lot of uprooting and change. It has affected my relationships, my mental health, my everyday life, and my writing. In this upheaval, a lot remains uncertain, and there are a lot of blank, ambiguous, and shifting spaces floating all around me. I know so many of us who are in times of transition, where we once again are beckoned to ask ourselves, “what do you want?”. This question always seems to fail me, and while I try to get in touch with my gut, I realize that there is never really one concrete answer. I want many things, or sometimes, I don’t know what I want, and that is okay too.

I am floating in a time of deep unknowing, where I am training and tightening the muscle that is my intuition and asking myself some difficult questions. Not only am I asking myself what I want, but I am also asking myself what I deserve. The second question is usually the trickier one, and unfortunately, the answers to both do not always align.

For four long years, I have been making it work in the US. I immigrated here from Australia to find a queer community and explore the possibilities of being a writer. I don’t have any family out here and have not seen my family in four years. For two of those years, I was arduously going through immigration struggles, being rejected from one visa after the other, and every six months I’d have to go through the strenuous efforts of compiling paperwork, hiring lawyers, and ensuring a sense of stability. I could not see my future beyond six months at a time. All I knew was that I wanted to stay, and I built my reality from there. That does not mean that I always got what I deserved, and I was usually put through a tailspin of uncertainty, anxiety, fear, and vigorously learning my rights. The system forced me to prove myself as a “model citizen”, and I spent years paranoidly watching my back. This state of unknowing became normalized in my everyday survival, and I had no choice but to get creative with these ever-shifting circumstances.

I have wanted to give up so many times. The immigration system pushed and pulled me into a perpetual state of scarcity and urgency. In order to have a peaceful long-term home, I felt like I had to be on my very vest behavior and prove myself worthy of it. This mindset has persisted, and my therapist Aditi pointed out to me that I have been operating from a scarcity mindset for most of my life, just like my mother. Scarcity mindset tells me that there is nothing out there for me, that my dreams must wait, and that even if I know what I want, that it will be a long time until I get what I truly deserve. It caused me to believe that there is a finite amount of love and blessings to go around, and I would constantly compare myself to people who seemed like they were experiencing stability and homeliness (an assumption). The scarcity mindset made me terrified of asking for help.

Truth be told, there is a sore lack of resources, especially for marginalized communities. The state pumps the earth of her natural blessings and hoards them for a small percentage of billionaires. Material abundance is purposefully distributed unevenly, and for those of us who grew up poor and financially struggling, a scarcity mindset is instilled in us because the state tells us that scarcity is all we will ever get. This mindset makes us believe that we need to perpetually prove ourselves of worthiness, goodness, and basic needs. Shifting into an abundance mindset is not acting as if scarcity and accessibility are not deliberately enacted onto marginalized communities, but more so realizing that we can enact many creative ways to redistribute and regenerate abundance with each other.

In the last four years, every time I reached a terrifying challenge, my scarcity mindset was activated. However, I was always be met with abundance. The abundance came in shapes that took me by surprise because it came in the form of love. Tapping into an abundance mindset was not pretending as if money and material would magically appear before me, but more so feeling less afraid to ask for support and believing that there is kindness that people are willing to multiply and share. Any time that I asked for help, I found myself surrounded by people who were willing to get creative and figure out how we could overcome these obstacles in solidarity with each other. We are the beholders of possibility, and when we are in crisis mode, the Earth splits open and allows us to create from these spaces of fertile unknowing.

What emerges from these times of struggle is creativity. In these uncertain moments, our perspective splits open. We have to generate new ideas and ways of survival, and new ways of interconnection and interderpendence. These times of unknowing are so difficult, and yet they also feel like fertile openings. They provide us profound insights into the possibilities that we can generate together. They beckon us to ask serious questions about how our love, desire, and joy is interconnected with each other. In these states of unknowing, so much is generously revealed to us, and that too is a form of abundance.

I want to challenge myself to always notice the abundance around me. In crisis mode, I want to become particularly tender and perceptive to the kindness and generosity of the Universe. Slowly throughout the years, I have found it less uncomfortable to ask for help. While I have braced myself for rejection, I was usually welcomed with warmth. My friends and chosen family have shown up for me in ways that we are imagining together, and what I want and deserve begins to align; perhaps not in the ways that I had initially envisioned, but because what I truly want and deserve is love. What we all deserve is love.

As I sat in my favourite park during Sunset one day, I had no choice but to notice the abundance around me. The towering trees were sprouting from the Earth, especially lush this NY Summer. Butterflies were fluttering in pairs, couples were intertwined in their heated Summer love, Chinese Aunties were doing their daily aerobics exercises, and flocks of birds were flying in formation towards the waterfront. The answers to my erratic questions began to emerge in many ways. Despite all of my unknowing, I knew that I was inseparable from the abundance all around me.

Our unknowing is a time that allows us to notice the blessings that we sometimes otherwise forget. There is abundance that emerges from the unknown, new possibilities and imaginations bubbling up, and surprises that await us. my unknowing reminds me that even stability is impermanent, and it calls for me to remember the constant forces of love in my life. Even amidst my heartache, love is an eternal reverberating force, and this place of unknowing allows me to access abundance from deep within.

PROMPTS FOR YOUR REFLECTION

1. WHAT IS REVEALED TO YOU DURING TIMES OF UNKNOWING?

2. WHEN DO YOU SEE ABUNDANCE AROUND YOU?

3. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABUNDANT WITHIN YOU?

PLAYLIST

A playlist of remembrance. Enjoy.