The elusiveness of gratitude & abundance

Overheard today:

Gratitude is the exquisite, nourishing sense of having enough. Abundance is experiencing what this means: that there’s nothing here, there’s no odds of something favourable coming, but there’s still enough for you for something to happen.

This was something I posted in 2015, and Facebook memories kindly reminded me of it today. I don’t even know where I got that from, if it was something I wrote myself, paraphrased, or extracted. But it nonetheless came at a perfect timing.

It’s all too easy to constantly feel under siege and in crisis mode, with the pandemic still going strong in the background of the world. Honestly, after almost a year of COVID, I’m beginning to even forget how those qualities of gratitude and abundance feel like…how I missed that “exquisite, nourishing sense of having enough”!

I really do wish I can be that optimistic, that even if “there’s no odds of something favourable coming”, I can still feel sufficient and provided for by the universe. The plain fact is, funds are running low. Business had not been good and no signs of recovery.

I was trying to recall, when was the last time I felt that degree of abundance and optimism. And it was during the good years when my consulting jobs were more than I could handle, and I could set work and financial targets to earn enough within nine months of the year, and take the rest of the year off.

It’s easy to feel abundant when times are good. Is it even possible to do that when times are bad? Yet we need this mindset more than ever when times are bad, isn’t it?

If anything, even if there’s no material abundance on the horizon, I probably need it now more than ever for my mental well-being. Figuring this out will be so helpful for setting up 2021 for success, for hitting my $5k MRR goals, for all the other goals about rest, heath and work. I’d tried affirmation exercises like writing a list of things to be grateful for, but it had always felt contrived at best (to me).

What can I do to recover that sense of optimistic abundance? Any ideas?