What do you give away freely? What do you keep from others? Does it feel different when you give some things vs other things or to some people vs. other people?
What about if no one seems to appreciate what you give? What if they appreciate but don’t realize it was you that gave it to them?
These are all questions I ask myself when I’m feeling the way I’m feeling right now.
I want to be someone who gives freely, but I also don’t want to invite anyone who takes advantage.
I want to be recognized for what I have to offer, not because I get off on praise but because recognition can become currency.
Imagine you knew you could help shape the direction of a city but no one would know it was you who engineered the change of direction. The change may benefit countless people but no one would thank you for it, and you might remain poor and without any status in the community, so you’d lack the ability to influence things directly, even if you could engineer a change in the overall current.
This may just be my own insecurities speaking, the weakest link in my psyche but I feel I need to write about it to reorganize my thoughts and heal my psyche.
Do you help others knowing that it’s entirely possible that you will be left behind? Withholding your gifts won’t benefit anyone, not even you. The only thing you get is the satisfaction that no one will be able to take advantage of you.
Well with the experience of being left behind, it feels like way too vulnerable a situation to want to give freely.
Not all skills are easily marketable. You can twist many of them into something that is marketable but in the process, you often lose the substance.
Take for instance, someone who is great at finding hidden gems that like to remain hidden. You could create a travel agency that takes people to these hidden gems and earn off your skills, but then you are betraying the trust of others.
This is the kind of predicament I often find myself in.
Many of the most obvious ways in which I could create more reliable income streams and live a more stable life would require me to exploit, and that’s not something I want to do. And many of the ways I could contribute to society without exploiting would require me to either distort the substance, turning something beautiful into something ordinary OR to give up any guarantee that I’ll be compensated.
As I learn more about abundance and how to build it as a state of mind first, I realize that trust is what I’m after.
Trust needs to be built, not given, but someone has to make the first move, and if no one else is going to I have to…and it’s not as if no one has. Some people have given me gifts that I could never repay, and without any expectation of anything in return.
Life has been good to me, it’s only hard to realize that when I compare myself to others or some ideal life that I’m working my way towards. People have been good to me too. It’s hard to remember that when it doesn’t happen every day and when so many people out there are stingy with their energy…hell they are even stingy with likes on web2 which are totally free, they are stingy to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone….and so the voices of all those helpful, beautiful souls are drowned out easily if we don’t focus on them.
So what happens if we do focus on them? Suddenly we feel that the world isn’t so stingy after all, it’s just the ghost of others fears that make us think it is.
We focus on the lions and bears that take what they want. We don’t focus on the trees that bear fruit regardless. Both are part of nature and we have the ability to channel either.
The tree doesn’t worry that it won’t succeed or be provided by sunlight. It knows how abundant the light of the sun is and it can provide enough pollen to know that it’s will will spread.
Which do I want to channel? A hungry animal living in a cave? An animal of prey, constantly living in fear? Or a tree in a place with sufficient rain, with fruit that gives without a second thought and basks in an infinite supply of light?
Maybe if someone comes and cut me or my friends down, I can become the predator for just a moment. If there is a disaster or not enough rain, and I’ve got to move, I can become the prey for just a moment, but I’d like the tree with its life of abundance to become the default.
I remember when I only had 3 songs. I wasn’t sure how I’d ever create any more and I worried so much that someone would steal them. Then over the years I wrote another 15 or 20 songs and realized I could probably create a lot more than that if I were to focus more time on it. Suddenly it became a lot less scary.
I also realized if I share the songs publicly there would be a record that I had created them first.
Now I hear the theme for Severance using a melody very similar to one that I wrote, obviously no one stole it from me since I hadn’t shared this song publicly, but the writer and I both stumbled upon a similar melody. I don’t feel threatened or angry at all. I can change my melody a bit to sound less like the theme and maybe discover something even better.
So I am still worrying that I won’t be compensated for the knowledge or tools that I share with others for free…but I’ve got to remember that I have way way way more to give, so much that I will never run out, and that so much of it is so original and special that it can’t be successfully copied. When what you share is 100% you, it’s 100c harder to copy it and anyone who COULD copy it wouldn’t have to because they’d have the skills to create something just as unique without copying g anything.
I’m not sure how well I did at expressing the depth of these feelings, as it could apply to all kinds of things, not just art and secret spots.
Imagine you see a weak point in Elon Musks rocket ship that has nothing to do with engineering. If you tell him you’ll probably get a thanks and he will build his rocket to mars and continue getting richer and likely forget about you because life is so full of so many things and to him it just felt like a tiny tip. Only you could feel the weight that that one tip carried, and maybe only if you have the confidence to give yourself that recognition.
I may write more on this or I may not. Let’s see how I feel in a few days.
