Trusting abundance

Learning from the limits of my pantry.

Sometimes, the value is in the negative space. (Image by Emmanuel Puzynin)

My pantry is made up of three stairs.

They used to be the back stairs of the house, many decades ago. Now they are narrow shelves, two of them just deep enough for a box of pasta and one just long enough for canned goods. (As stairs, they match our remaining staircase in that the treads aren’t even deep enough to fit your whole foot).

I’ve been living in a very small house by American standards (under 900 square feet, less than 84 square meters) for five years now, but I’m still adjusting. For instance, it has taken me until very recently to change my grocery-buying habits. “Might as well get a can of beans. Might as well grab another jar of curry sauce.” But no — there’s only so much those three shelves can handle.

Instead, I have to buy groceries for the coming week, and that’s it. I don’t have room for back stock.

I don’t really have room for choices: I can’t fit Alfredo sauce and red sauce. It’s going to be one or the other in a given week.

This is hard for me to grasp since I’ve never really paid close attention. Historically, I have purchased a bunch of groceries with only a vague sense of commitment — I’ve kept my options open. The bell peppers could become fajitas or they might be incorporated into a salad. It would be a game-time decision.

But lately, in an effort to keep my pantry stair-shelves from overflowing, I’ve been seeing things with new eyes. If my family consumes three slices of bread each morning at breakfast and the loaf has fourteen slices, we’ll need a new loaf after about four days. It’s just...math. Why have I been making it so complicated?

What I’m seeing is the finiteness of our food consumption. By the end of the week, we will have made all of our choices about what and how much to eat, and that’s that. It’s not abstract at all. So I can anticipate those choices up front — I can plan — and then watch it all play out.

I had a similar revelation about clothing a few years ago. I realized that I can choose to own, say, a certain number of t-shirts, and I can know exactly how many I have. None of this, “a few are in the hamper and I think there are some in the dryer.” No, it can be absolutely knowable.

In the past, I’ve had a lot of trouble applying this concept to time and money, two finite things that I can easily delude myself into believing are infinite. I can mentally spend the same future hour four different ways, and I don’t realize until it arrives that I have overcommitted myself. I take on too much and figure I can borrow the time from somewhere. It works for awhile, which is the reason I keep doing it. However, it inevitably leads to overwhelm and dropped balls.

I can avoid these negative consequences by accepting time as finite. In fact, I can look at pretty much every finite thing in my life and act accordingly. Allowing for a fudge factor gets me in trouble.

It’s a bit of a paradox: I want abundance in my life and I seek to transcend reality. To achieve those things, my most effective path is to take on less and accept reality.

To be content with fewer items in my pantry is to trust in the abundance of the grocery store and the efficacy of my meal plan.

To have fewer commitments on my to-do list is to face my own mortality.

Whoa!

That doesn’t seem at all like an abundance-oriented, expansive view of reality at first. But if I consider that mortality is what makes time precious, that leads me to a whole suite of decisions that take into account my higher aspirations in life.

It challenges me to step into the future I want instead of imagining that I have the luxury of infinite futures.

I mean, I have them in the sense that I have an abundant menu. And then I get to pick what I want from the menu and find contentment in that choice.

Maybe the “transcending reality” part is the skill of tricking myself into contentment even when things don’t look exactly like I hoped they would.

Ready for my help in 2026? Let’s discuss!