The Scarcity Tax: Why I Stopped Looking for More and Started Shaping Mud

I sat there staring at a calendar that felt like a cage, my chest tightening with that familiar, suffocating pressure. A physical weight. A panic that screamed not enough. Not enough time. Not enough resources. Not enough me.

I was wrong.

I had to dig into why this feeling of lack paralyzes me every time I try to build something new. It is not just a mood. The research is terrifying. Psychologists have found that being preoccupied with scarcity literally drops your functional IQ by 13 to 14 points. It creates a tunnel vision that blinds you to the resources right in front of your face. My brain was actively deleting options to focus on the threat.

You know that feeling when you're so focused on the closed door you can't see the open window?

I needed a different framework, so I looked at the physics of it. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. This hit me hard. If this is true, then lack is an illusion. Everything needed is already here. It’s just in a different form.

It’s just waiting to be shaped.

This forced me to rethink the word itself. I looked up the etymology. Abundance. It comes from the Latin abundare, which means "to overflow".

It’s not about accumulation.

It’s about flow.

I realized I’ve been trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it, thinking abundance was the static water level. But abundance is the stream. As the entity Bashar describes it, abundance is simply the ability to do what you need to do, when you need to do it.

You’ve probably felt this too. That moment when you stop grasping and start breathing.

I thought about the story of the almond seed I read recently. A tiny, wrinkly thing that looks like absolutely nothing. But the tree is already in the seed. It doesn't need to go find a tree. It needs to work. It needs to put down roots and unfold.

I was waiting for the orchard to appear.

I forgot I had to plant the seed.

The foundational reframe transforming my life right now is this: Abundance is not something I acquire; it is a skill of shaping the raw energy that is already present.

This is my work right now. To stop looking for the harvest and start shaping the mud. To recognize the "ruined valley" not as a place of lack, but as a place of raw material.

What seeds are sitting in your pocket right now?

Follow along as I continue to walk this path.

I explore this in The Journey of Abundance.

#abundance #mindset #growth #healing #neuroscience #fyp