Generosity versus Scarcity

These two terms are approaches and philosophies a person chooses from time to time and situation to situation.

Coming to generosity, it means you give out your best in every conversation and activity you do. It means you offer more than what is being asked because you think the situation or the person needs it or deserves it.

Flipping the coin to scarcity, it is limitation. It means you close off. You don’t show up as the best version of yourself. You hide. You suppress your creativity and humanity genius. It also means you don’t trust your surroundings and people and you decide to adopt scarcity to protect yourself and stay safe and secured.

Now you maybe thinking: Don’t we need both the terms in our daily activities? Maybe some situations require us to be generous and other scenarios need us to be scarce. Well that could be but depends as well.

According to the current environmental set-up, it encourages you to be scarce. Why? Because it ignores your voice. It suppresses your feelings. It neglects you and puts you aside. It isolates you and keeps you in that dark lonely box.

Thinking about the truth in such a context, we always have got the personal inner freedom to respond to this situation using the approach that suits us best. It is not always in our favour when we allow such toxic environment to shape our behaviours and daily actions. We could probably observe the situation non-judgmentally, understand its origin and roots, reflect its consequences and peacefully arrive in a better place of being, allowing, opening up and giving.

I learn a lot about generosity from Seth Godin who says: Generosity is the perfect antidote to fear.

Coming to scarcity, you may think: But I use it when I find people don’t deserve or need my best efforts. Well I don’t necessarily call it scarcity. This is a personal boundary you use with another person to teach him or her how you want to be treated next time. Doing this removes the tensions and hard feelings that come with scarcity and allows you to come back to your centre again.

It is interesting to think about generosity and scarcity. It is normal to find yourself open up and shrink from time to time. We are humans. We have feelings. And it is okay to feel all our feelings. But also working with those feelings and adding awareness on the labels we attach to them can transform our internal perspectives.