“… when I’m feeling good, I can be a lot more generous.”

I think the other part, really, is my mental health during covid and after. Like, pre-covid I was doing a lot of like mindfulness practices, meditation and going to yoga really often, and feeling overall pretty good, and then through covid because of the stress of contact tracing, and the stress everyone was experiencing, that just really fell away, and I think for me one of the sort of cornerstone things I noticed when I’m starting to not feel great is that I really shift into this scarcity mindset. So I think it plays – this conversation plays really nicely into the topic this week about generosity and greed because I find that when I am not feeling well mentally or I’m feeling stressed, it’s really hard for me to be generous. I shift into this, like, “Everything is scarce. My – you know, I don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough A, B, C, or D. I can’t possibly share these things,” versus when I’m feeling good, I can be a lot more generous. I start to think of things in sort of an abundance mindset, and I feel like that is sort of my lesson to be learned in life. Like, how do I understand kind of through the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations of life, that there is not a limited quantity of the things that matter. Like, there’s not a limited quantity of love in my life, or like I can be generous. Not always financially because that is a concrete thing that sometimes is limited, but I can be generous in my time, or you, know, listening to somebody, supporting somebody. And so that’s something I’m aware of needing to work on. I know that it feeds into that feeling of like, “I have no free time. I need to -” I just always picture, kind of, like the troll under the bridge like, “Mine mine mine mine mine,” like when I start to feel this way, of like I just feel myself wanting to hunker down and like pull close the things that are important to me and guard them. I guess, I’m also thinking of like a food-insecure dog or whatever you call it when they get really cranky if you are near them when they’re eating, so they might let you in the same room, but they’re like lowly growling the entire time. That’s how I feel. So yeah, just something that I guess maybe the first obstacle is being aware of it. But the second much more difficult obstacle is trying to navigate your way out of it. I have noticed with this break, I took some time off for Christmas, and my brain just feels like a lot clearer, which I’m grateful for, and I hope that I can kind of carry that into the new year and set things off on a different tone.