Simplicity is All About Abundance – Meditations on an Ugli Fruit
Last week I had an experience that has set my mind into a flurry of thought.
I was taking a morning walk with my 9 year old through the pedestrian walkways of our neighborhood. It’s one of my favorite places to walk here in Oaxaca, away from the noise of cars and buses, the “andadores” of our neighborhood are flourishing with colors of flowers, trees and brightly painted modest houses. We were on our way back from the neighborhood market when Mia noticed many fruits fallen from one of the trees.
“What are those fruits?” she asked
“I think they’re ugli fruits”
“Mommy, that’s mean”
“No – really, I think they’re actually called ‘ugli’ fruit because of the way they look. That’s their name”
“Can we take them home and eat them?”
Mia saw an opportunity to try a new fruit and she was excited. I saw yellowish orange, wrinkled and misshapen fruits, many of which were already in stages of rot and had ants crawling on them. But I try really hard not to let my own prejudices affect my children.
“Well, if you can find one that’s not rotten we can try it”
Mia found a good size fruit within about a 1/2 second that showed no signs of rot and wasn’t covered with ants. She carried it home happily and showed it off to her sisters. She set to work right away with a knife to open the fruit. The pulp inside was pale yellow but smelled wonderful. We tasted it and it was extremely sour – more than a lemon. I suggested it might be good for making lemonade. Mia made a glass of the best tasting ugli fruit-ade I have ever had. It was more delicious than lemonade and I’m looking forward to getting more soon.
That was the experience that has caused me many thoughts this week.
This fruit made delicious juice. Really, some of the best I’ve ever had. And yet no one appears to be collecting the fruits from this tree. They lie scattered on the ground, rotting and drawing ants. Why, I wondered is no one interested in this fruit? Like me, people walk past this tree many times a day, their arms heavy with things they bought at the market. I wonder how many people, like me, assume the fruit is worthless because of its appearance or because they see so many rotting on the ground?
How often in life do we turn our noses up at abundance that is right in front of us? How many times do we walk away because we think something isn’t worthy of our attention?
I thought about this and about the power that marketing has had on so many of us. We learn to believe that if something doesn’t carry a certain label, if it’s not found in a certain store or used by a respected friend then it must not be good enough. I believe this attitude comes from a more deep-seated fear inside many of us that we “don’t have enough” – and that we are “measured by what we have”.
We don’t have enough
If you’re interested in simple living or lifestyle design you’re probably enthusiastic about downsizing, getting rid of clutter and freeing yourself from so many material possessions. I’m also passionate about that and yet it is so easy to fall back into that nagging sense that I might be missing out on something because I don’t have some thing. I can usually dismiss that thought pretty quickly – but it’s still there and comes up from the depths of my inner mind on a pretty regular basis.
We are measured by what we have
More difficult (for me anyway) to dismiss is the thought that what I have should be worthy. The problem with this is that “worthy” is so warped by marketing messages. Here in Mexico I have bought the cheapest stripped down cell phone when the one I brought from the U.S. broke. It works perfectly well and I was perfectly happy until the day my friend came to visit with her new Iphone. She showed off some of the cool apps and what they could do. I played around with it and pretty soon I wasn’t feeling so happy with mine. My once “good enough” phone quickly turned into an ugli fruit.
Even the most frugal of us can feel tempted by something new and shiny. It’s easy to rationalize a purchase like that, especially if you recycle your old item, sell it on E-bay, or do something else so that you’re replacing an item instead of accumulating another. Still, it’s a purchase and more often than not and un-needed one. Even if you maintain your personal item count you have brought yet another item into the sea of products accumulating on this earth’s surface. Face it – if we didn’t buy them they wouldn’t make them. A purchase is our stamp of approval to the maker to keep churning things out.
I walked past that ugli fruit tree without a second glance exactly due to this thought – that it wasn’t worthy. Why? Because my mind wasn’t in a place to notice abundance. Luckily my child’s mind was.
Abundance is all around us but must be in us first
Abundance is all around us but in order to notice it and accept it our minds must be in a state of abundance first. How do we do this? I won’t pretend to know the answer but here are some thoughts to counter those above that might help.
“It’s not having what you want. It’s wanting what you’ve got”
Sheryl Crowe says it about as well as it could be said. The answer isn’t in getting. The answer is in being content with having. Face it, most of us from 1st world countries have everything that we need to live a basic life. Let’s be thankful for the things we have and learn to love them. If you love what you have the feeling of need will go away. You will live in a mindset of abundance.
When we feel that our lives are abundant we stop looking for “stuff” to fill an inner need.
When we stop looking to fill an inner need from the outside, we are free to notice the abundance around us without the judgemental thought about whether it’s worthy of our attention. Suddenly the ugli fruit becomes worthy of a try. Why not? There’s nothing to lose.
How much simpler can life really be than being content with what we have and enjoying those things that are right in front of us when we need them?
Photo by: Uncleboatshoes
