A woman on a list I hang out on asked how to teach her child about abundance while still teaching her to conserve water, for example. The bigger question is, I think, “How do I believe in abundance when there really isn’t enough?!”

We’re using up finite reserves of oil from the earth. Clean water is truly scarce in some places, and must be imported in others. (Look at Las Vegas, here in the U.S.)? And there isn’t enough atmosphere to safely absorb and dilute all the CO2 we’re putting in it.

Thinking about how to talk to my own kids about it, I’ve realized that I believe that there is an abundance, not just of material things, not even primarily of material things, but of things like learning, joy, and adaptation.

We can look at a situation where we have, say, only a little milk in the house, and we want to make pancakes. We may not have “enough” milk to make the batter, and still have some to drink. But we have our minds! We can choose to make something else, choose to trade some of what we have (usually money) for some more milk, make the pancakes without milk and have milk to drink in a glass, or go for a long walk to pick flowers and forget about the pancakes. In the moment, the abundance of energy we have for figuring this stuff out will create answers I can’t imagine from where I’m sitting.