Today I chose to eat cat food … well, actually cat treats. So, what happened was I decided to make some breakfast. I enjoy a yogurt and berry parfait with a banana for sweetener and a little granola on top. This comes from trips I made to Tulum where this was a little continental breakfast served to me each morning and it just sat well with me having those memories. So, I’ve been eating this meal for breakfast for a few years now and it’s one of my favorite light breakfasts. As I mashed up my banana with my yogurt and cut up my strawberries and put
in some blueberries and blackberries in it, I decided to sprinkle some granola on top as I usually do. I opened the container and sprinkled what I thought was granola, but unfortunately I decided to use
that container for cat treats recently because the original container is really big and i just left the granola in the original bag. I realized I put some of the cat treats my parfait and was immediately devastated. When I say devastated that means I yelled the loudest profanity I could yell. Immediately my brain gears are rolling around and I realized quickly that I could either throw away the parfait I just made. Sometimes our immediate thoughts are the best. I could also pick out what was
sprinkled on top which was kind of a lot and everything else that it may have touched. I thought about it for a minute and I could feel my brain working hard and a thought came to me that cat food is just people food called cat food. It’s not like it’s poison. So I decided to eat what was left after I picked out all of the treats. I wasn’t sure that this was the right idea, however it seemed reasonable and I wouldn’t be wasting food which was a major tenant in my life as I was raised in a scarcity mentality. How many of us were trained to not waste food.
I was ok with this decision. I could be liberal enough to make sure I spooned out everything the cat treats touched. I dug all the pieces out. I threw them on the floor so my dogs would eat the yogurt covered cat treats. I did start to wonder though if I got them all and didn’t just push any deeper into the bowl. It seemed good. I felt that I did well. I began to eat my parfait. I had alot of caution as I ate. I realized I wasn’t even really enjoying the taste of the yogurt because of my caution. Of course, I ended up encountering one tiny speck of this cat food that I did not find that I did push deeper into my bowl and the taste of that treat was still in my mouth hours later even though I immediately spit everything out. For the next few hours I thought what is the lesson here. It hit me that it’s
obviously abundance. I literally had just gone to Costco and bought new bananas (so many that I usually have to either throw out because they go bad or feed to my dog), a new, huge size yogurt, large sizes of berries and a new bag of granola. I wasn’t going to save the world if I just threw away that whole bowl I ate when I ruined it with cat treats on top. It isn’t unusual for food to be thrown away and restaurants do it everyday. In fact, my dogs would have LOVED a cat treat parfait.
Abundance … not scarcity. We are to live in abundance. Jesus said we are to live and Abundant life. Abundance is not about have alot of worldly possessions or money. It can encompass that, but abundance includes love and family and friends and contentment and unconditional self-love.
Abundance is what we are to practice and learn and understand. The birds and squirrels do not worry about how much they have or what they will eat tomorrow. We have SOOOO much. Perspective is an important part of abundance. Even though I have millionaire clients who have more wealth than me, I will tell others that I am VERY wealthy. I may have more abundance than many of my near billionaire clients. I have gratitude for the Wisdom that is given. I will throw away cat treat parfaits in the future and live an abundant life.
Leave a Reply