Alessia

In thinking about the ways that scarcity and abundance play a role in my life I could not help but immediately imagine a scale. Scarcity lives on one side, abundance on the other and in between is tension SPACE Over the last couple of weeks my project partners and I have spent countless minutes navigating theories, thoughts, and feelings tied to both scarcity and abundance and the impacts that they have in and on our lives. One of the foundational questions that has grounded me in this project is asking “How does the tension between abundance and scarcity push and pull us into enjoyment?” SPACE I think about this question a lot these days. There are many people such as Nietzsche that tell us suffering is beneficial to us. It makes us stronger and more resilient to withstand things that lay ahead. Many religions and other spiritual practices I have bumped against over the years tell me similar things. That suffering is the only way we really understand and process enjoyment or that in order to understand our own abundance we must also witness suffering. I feel many different ways about this. My Scorpio Sun is stubborn and refuses to believe that suffering needs to exist at all whereas my Leo Rising understands that suffering also humbles. SPACE We don’t get a lot of say in the systems we have to participate in. We work to have money, to pay rent, to eat, to live. I built dependency on items with price tags to tell me that “I have accessed joy” or that “I can have fun.” Yet it is the things with lesser monetary value or expiry that I have found myself reveling in the tension of scarcity and abundance. SPACE I think about the rich, how they got there and how they continue to stay there and I ask myself “How does one remember suffering exists when they are so far removed from it? Does abundance even exist when it is all you ever experience?”