One of the fears I’ve had to work through in my life is the anxiety-producing story that I am always in danger of “wasting” something finite and precious, like time, money, or most worrisome of all: life itself.

This is an anxiety born of a particular worldview - that the whole of reality is bound by laws of linear time and finite space and that meaning is only ever created by how much we can get done within those parameters. Put together with capitalism - a system that places us in constant and ruthless competition, mandates productivity as way of being, and asks us to get from here to there in straight, efficient lines - it’s no surprise that scarcity fears run so rampant through the collective.

In one sense, there is truth to all of this. I do have a limited amount of time and resources that are mine to manage carefully and steward wisely.

But as I’ve come to see it, this is not the whole truth, and when scarcity becomes the entire story, we are allowed no margin for error and no space to breathe.

When I get caught up in these fears, I often stay small out of terror that any mistake will propel me out of my prescribed orbit and into uncharted mystery where I might - god forbid - have to spend extra time and energy navigating the unknown and excavating the unexpected.

So what I’ve been working through for myself and with clients is finding and connecting with what is unquantifiable. What I’ve found is that there is a truth, power, and life-force within each of us that is ultimately uncontainable, and therefore, unwastable.

We are whole and vast. And from this vantage point, all the detours, question marks, and empty spaces we dismissed as losses and wasted opportunities might actually be the keys to our becoming, deepening, soul’s alchemy.