DRIVERS PICK OF THE WEEK

As I always say, there is no best post, especially with you guys, but I always like to choose a post that touched me and has that something special quality about it. This week I would like to shine some light on @stortebeker:

@stortebeker

Abundance Woes 1/4 - What To Do With All That Stuff?

This week @ecotrain has presented us with another wonderful opportunity to look around us, look inside us, and come up with an answer to the Question of the Week: What have you had too much abundance of, and how did you deal with it? Just as I usually do, instead of jumping right in, I spent some time mulling over this question, leading me to a number of examples I could talk about. Since I consider each of them equally good, though none of them perfect for the occasion, I decided to mention all of them a little bit.

Thousands of Bicycles All Around Us!

It was last year, exactly around this time, when I found myself in the epicenter of bike-abundance. I was volunteering at Recyclistas Bike Shopin Victoria, BC, learning about bike mechanics, and building my wonderful Red Fox which would take me down the US West coast. All in all it was a fantastic experience I described in this post. One of the main reasons was the shop's approach to materials, that is bike parts and components.

@misslasvegas

Let's be honest: in the Western world, most people just have too much 'stuff'. I'm not an exception either, although I've gotten a lot better (read: less of a hoarder) than I was. When my eldest daughter was born, I had bought everything she needed and more before the birth. Then people brought me bags full of clothes. My mother bought clothes. And in our city, there is a huge weekend-long flea market where I bought even more. As a result, I had shelves full of clothes for the next 2 years at least. In fact, there was so much that in the summer, I could have changed her three times a day and she still wouldn't have worn it all.

@sagescrub

I realized today how I would answer this question when I had an epiphany about a gardening problem. Recently I had noticed that several of the garden patches that I had seeded with spring veggies did not sprout. Other types of veggies sprouted great! So I started troubleshooting and figured I needed to give those patches more water since the soil was drying. But they still didn't sprout. Of course a myriad of weeds were growing just fine thank you!

There is this little voice in the back of my mind. Actually it is more of a feeling than a voice. It often offers emotional responses to challenges in my life. If I really really step back and listen to what it had said I hear things like "You're not good enough of a gardener yet" or "You don't even know why its not working"

@nainaztengra

Anything in Abundance in our lives just does not happen by chance. What energy we spread out in the universe in the form of thoughts, actions, words just bounces back to us and we tune ourselves into that frequency. So there is no doubt oh having Abundance of anything that one would desire. Abundance of Joy or Abundance of Sorrow it is all upto us, Abundance of Wealth or Abundance of Poverty the choice is all ours.

Before I start writing what is it that I have in Abundance in my life, let me share with you one of my secret Mantra to Abundance, and I give this to all my clients. Over a period of time they have seen how they get tuned to the frequency of Abundance. It is my daily morning Mantra which I keep saying it in my mind from the time I get up till around an hour. I like to be in complete silence when I get up in morning and just be with my Mantra.I talk only if it is required else I do not make any unnecessary communication with anyone.

@steelborne

They say too much of a good thing can't possibly be bad right? Depends on what exactly it is we are speaking off...

It is true that while there are many good use cases for some things in this world that we have as an abundance. Take water as an example. Why is it that water is such an abundant resource in the world yet there are times that those living in impoverished nations can't get clean drinking water? The answer to that question ignites another debate - around money.

We have plenty of money in this world - yet we can't seem to find ways to help those most in need. Money is a funny thing...it doesn't even truly exist. It's man made. We created it and gave it "value" in order to conduct business needs. Had this never happened perhaps we wouldn't have many of the problems we face in the world today. Maybe society would simply "function" and fulfill the needs of the people without a monetary reward. Our Utopian lives we so often wish for might have been reality if "money" had never been created. Even precious metals really don't have an inherent monetary value. Man made it that way so that we could "acquire" what we felt was necessary in our lives. It's a funny thing and perhaps another topic for another day...

@artemislives

I'm never really sure about mango season anymore - the dripping, exotic lusciousness that is best sucked and eaten in a cool bath (preferably shared) with a crisp chardonnay on the side is somewhat sullied by the eternal smell of rotting fruit outside, plagues of fruit flies and our old Thai landlady coming by every few days to ask why we're not EATING them all. Plus we don't currently have a bath and eating mangoes, one gets very, very sticky.

Did I mention it's HOT - as in really hot - at this time of the year? 38C+++ (100F++) most everyday means they lay on the fruit bowl and blacken in a day or two. It's compounded by not only the trees in the garden dripping-raining fruit, but EVERY house in the village has a tree and we are GIFTED them left, right and center too. Being such an empathic soft-touch, I also find it exceedingly painful to walk past an old Thai grandma in the Thai market selling her fruit for pittance - if our eyes lock and I feel her desperation to sell, I buy. I can't help it. Despite knowing there will be a "Mama, we're drowning in mangoes already!" wail from my daughter when I get home.

@walkerland

This weeks Ecotrain QOTW asks about Abundance Woes. "What have you had too much abundance of, and how did you deal with it?"

I pride myself in re-purposing and not being wasteful and I buy used most of the time. Even so, there is always going to be an accumulation of certain things. Clothing is one of those things that really bothers me because everything is made cheaply these days and the fashion industry is doing so much damage to our planet. I was not always careful when it came to clothing shopping, and as such, it was our biggest item of abundence that we needed to deal with.

In the winter, we decided to go through every single item in the house, and decide if we should keep it or not.

We didn't have much we didn't want until we got to our boxes of old clothing. We were shocked (and a little bit humbled) when we saw how much clothing we were holding onto.

@metametheus

Abundance woes

In this week's EcoTrain Question Of The Week @eco-alex asks us "what have you had too much abundance of, and how did you deal with it? What would have been the likely outcome if you had not dealt with it both short and long term?

Waste is an un-realised abundance.

That was the wonderful re-frame I took from @eco-alex's QOTW announcement post.

And so I contemplated where I sat with this notion. What came was the word "gratitude".

With that word, I suddenly noticed that the abundance I thought I was chasing was already here, and I was missing it. In those instances, I have been focussed on what I didn't have, instead of looking at what I have plenty of and wondering how I can re-purpose it.

This is not limited to material things, but also thoughts, emotions, ideas, time, and so on and so forth.

@trucklife-family

Abundance, a word that I have always viewed as being positive. Especially when I look to nature and witness the abundance of life that surrounds us. No matter where you are in the world, you are surrounded by life. We are made up of an abundance of life giving cells and nature provides us with an abundance of plants in which to aid us in our quest to live a life of balance. Natures way is to provide all life with an abundance of what it needs.

But then @eco-alex posed this question, asking us to look at our abundance woes. So here I find myself being forced to see the dark side of abundance. Which of course exists, it's just I would never chose to associate that word with it. Abundance to me sounds joyful and something that you would want to embrace, not frown upon and wish to discard. But really any abundance that comes into our lives, we should deal with it,be it the good or the bad.

@minismallholding

Abundance woes?! Surely abundance is a good thing? As @eco-alex has pointed out, it can become a bad thing when our abundance becomes an excess and leads to waste. This week's @ecotrain Question of the Week asks us when we had an abundance of something and what we did about it.

I was once having a conversation with my neighbour about his garden changes. He's not a keen gardener and is away from home quite a lot, so he wanted something that was easy to deal with and minimal maintenance. He mentioned that he'd had an apple tree at one point, but got rid of it because they didn't eat many apples, then it just dropped the excess ones and he had to deal with them. So his solution was to get rid of the cause of the abundance and chop down the tree.

I knew what he meant. When we first bought our house we inherited some fruit trees with it and the second year of apples was so abundant we couldn't keep up with them. We would gather up the windfalls and throw them into a pile to compost, but they fermented and some of the visiting birds were eating them, then getting drunk. We found ourselves having to protect them from the neighbour's cat, which was not good and we couldn't protect them once they'd left the garden. Luckily a lidded compost bin had been left with the house, so I set that up and moved them into it.

@hopehuggs

I was going to initially answer this as that I have an abundance of good fortune, as there has been no time in my life where I have no roof over my head, or food on the table. I have been blessed well and truly by this fact.

But, I read something this morning that made me change my track, good 'ol synchronicity…

My guilty abundance is definitely wanting to do everything. I think that might be something that a lot of people are guilty of. Okay, so not EVERY SINGLE thing, but I don't have enough hours in the day to do everything I wanted to.

• My daily to-do list is as long as Santa's nice (or naughty) list.
• I come across exciting new ventures to try every day...

@steemflow

Frankly it took me a great dive to find the abundant thing I had in my life. Be it personal or be it general. While looking for something, a lesson of my dad came into my mind.

"Too much of anything is bad". This is one of the few lesson that I learnt from my Dad. And this is what he got from his dad. So it's is kind of legacy that keeps passing on from one generation to another. The best part of growing up in Indian middle class family, you hardly get anything in abundance except the Values & Ethics. In a Middle Class society , there is always some kind of red-neck i.e jugad available to take on something.

The most important lesson one can take out from Indian Middle class is to how to stay happy in a limited resource. Indian Middle class family, keep all the alternative open, to make the best out of everything. Be it using an old cloth for duster, to making an old cup as pen stand. They keep many old rejected items at home, hoping to be used in near future. Few noticeable facts / trends about Indian Middle Class:

@jonyoudyer

Hello my fellow Steemian's! So this post is my answer to the ecoTrain's question of the week, which can be found in this post, Abundance Woes. I am sure a lot of us have had this issue. Especially in the New World. Abundance could be a blessing, or a curse. For instance, having an abundance of food can be a blessing, for you will never run out. But what if you have so much food, and it spoils before you can even consume it? So is it a blessing, or a curse? It really depends on how you handle your abundance.

To much of a good thing?

Since I have a perpetual grow utilizing cloning to keep the cycle going, I always end up with a over flow of plants! This is due to my small space, and I always make sure to take enough so I will guarantee a strain will not be lost. Starting from seed is a long process. Another downside from starting from seed, is a cannabis plant can be a male. For those that are unfamiliar with what I am talking about, a male produces pollen sacs, and a female produces the flower that all cannabis smokers love. Cloning is not only a faster process, but if you clone from a good female, that cut will be the exact copy of the mother.

@riverflows

This question came at a perfect time for me, just as I'm organising a local seed and plant swap in our local community Facebook group. Yeah yeah, I know Facebook is a bit of a swear word around here, but, considering most people around have it, and I can't talk ANYONE into getting on the steem blockchain, it's a nice and easy way to contact people and create community online, and I've been running our local gardening page there for so long now that everyone knows about it and benefits from it, so I'm not abandoning THAT side of Facey anytime soon.

Being blessed with five acres, we've been growing our own fruit and vegetables for a while now. I always seem to grow far more than what I need, and love giving it away - in fact, partly the reason I grow so much IS to give it away, keeping food production local and keeping money out of big supermarkets that exploit farmers and sell food either overly packaged, overly laden with chemicals or not as fresh as they claim in their slogans. I love this 'punk' side of gardening - I love not being forced into a consumer society because I am responsible for a big amount of our food and I love how cheap and easy it is, let alone fresh and nutritious. I also adore the joy it brings people when I share it at work or give it away in our community group. I suppose it would never really go to waste in this system - the chickens eat what we can't, or it goes into the compost heap. Short term, waste gets recycled. Long term - I'm hoarding stuff to myself that could benefit wider society in many, many ways.