An Abundance of Everything

October has arrived, and apparently everything I started, agreed to, wished for, worried about or enthusiastically declared was a brilliant idea earlier this year has decided it’s time to check in. All at once.

The calendar is full, the phone won’t shut up, there are things I need to finish, things I haven’t started, and at least three projects I distinctly remember thinking would be wonderful ideas back in March. Apparently March Me was an ambitious little creature with absolutely no understanding of how many hours there are in a day.

And the funny thing is, I asked for some of this. I wanted opportunities, interesting projects, good people, new experiences and enough going on that life didn’t become one long exercise in wondering what to make for dinner. Well, congratulations. The universe apparently took notes. I’ve got abundance coming out of my ears, and some days I’d like to return a portion of it without a receipt.

I was thinking about that the other evening while trying to finish something I’d promised myself would be done weeks ago. The dogs wanted out, my phone was buzzing, dinner was becoming a questionable proposition, and I found myself wondering how a year that seemed to have so much time left in January had managed to arrive at October with half its business still unfinished.

Outside, the light was already fading. The trees were changing, the air had that unmistakable autumn chill, and the world seemed perfectly content to move along without consulting my schedule. Nature was winding things down while I was still trying to figure out how to fit another six hours into Tuesday.

That’s when the whole business of harvest and abundance struck me as rather funny.

We’ve managed to turn abundance into something suspiciously perfect. Beautiful tables overflowing with food, golden sunlight, happy people, candles, pumpkins and everybody looking deeply grateful for everything they have. Nobody appears to have an overdue electric bill, a difficult relative or seventeen things that need to be done before Thursday.

It’s a lovely picture, but it leaves out about half of what abundance actually looks like.

Because abundance simply means having a lot of something, and nobody said it all had to be wonderful. You can have an abundance of responsibilities, opportunities, opinions, problems, commitments and people who apparently believe your telephone exists exclusively for their convenience. You can have so many good things happening that you barely have time to enjoy any of them. You can even have an abundance of absolutely nothing going according to plan.

And sometimes you can look around at a year that hasn’t delivered much of anything you hoped for and wonder where the hell the harvest went.

That’s what makes October such an interesting point on the Wheel. We’ve passed Mabon, that brief balance between light and darkness, and we’re moving toward Samhain, when the growing season reaches its end and the darker half of the year begins. The natural world is changing its pace, whether we’re ready or not, and somewhere in that shift we find ourselves living with the results of everything we’ve been doing since the year began.

Remember January? All that time stretching ahead of us, all those things we were going to accomplish, all those excellent decisions we were absolutely going to make. We had plans, ambitions and perhaps a slightly inflated opinion of how cooperative life was going to be.

Some worked beautifully. Others fizzled before Valentine’s Day. A few became much bigger than expected, and at least one probably has us wondering what the hell we were thinking. Then there are the things we never planned at all. Someone else’s decision changed everything. An opportunity appeared out of nowhere. Something we counted on disappeared, or life threw something at us that wasn’t on the calendar, the vision board or anybody’s bingo card.

The trouble with harvests is that we like to imagine they’re tidy little rewards for our efforts, but life isn’t nearly that cooperative. Sometimes you do everything right and get very little for your trouble. Sometimes you stumble into something wonderful without having the faintest idea how you got there. And sometimes you spend months nurturing something that eventually becomes an enormous pain in the ass.

I thought about a commitment I’d made earlier in the year, one of those perfectly reasonable little agreements that seemed harmless at the time. By October, that innocent little agreement had apparently acquired relatives, developed expectations and begun demanding regular updates. I could hardly complain about where it came from. I’d invited the damn thing in myself.

Sometimes we’re overwhelmed by circumstances beyond our control, but sometimes we’ve been remarkably successful at creating the very things we’re now complaining about. We said yes when we wanted to say no. We kept postponing a conversation until the silence became its own problem. We gave too much attention to something that didn’t deserve it, or kept feeding an irritation until it grew into a resentment that could practically pay rent.

Of course, the opposite happens too. We take a chance on something ridiculous, make one small decision without giving it much thought, or meet someone at precisely the right moment. Months later, we realize that tiny beginning changed the direction of everything.

Be careful what you plant. The harvest has a remarkable memory.

That doesn’t mean every difficulty is something we caused. I’ve never had much patience for the notion that people attract every misfortune through the wrong thoughts or insufficient spiritual enthusiasm. Sometimes terrible things happen to wonderful people, and no amount of positive thinking changes that. The Wheel has never promised perfect weather or a fair harvest.

But what about the year that looks sparse? Maybe someone worked their tail off and has very little to show for it. The business didn’t grow, the money isn’t there or the big plan never got off the ground. It’s easy to look around in October and decide the whole year has been a disappointment.

And sometimes it has been. We don’t need to sprinkle gratitude over everything like powdered sugar and pretend otherwise.

But perhaps something else happened along the way. A friendship became unexpectedly important. Something insignificant in February turned into a genuine pleasure by September. There were ordinary afternoons worth remembering, laughter that caught us off guard or a new interest that made life a little more interesting. None of those things replaces what was lost, but they belong to the year just as much as everything that didn’t work out.

Then there’s the opposite problem, the year when nearly everything happens. An abundance of friendships means people to care about. An abundance of opportunities means decisions and risks. An abundance of possessions means things to maintain, organize and eventually wonder why the hell we bought it in the first place. Even an abundance of love comes with the uncomfortable knowledge that we now have something precious enough to worry about losing.

We spend so much time wishing for more that we rarely consider what more will actually require of us.

By the time I finally finished what I was doing that evening, the house had quieted down. The dogs had settled, the phone had stopped demanding my attention, and I took my coffee outside for a few minutes before the cold drove me back in.

The sky was that beautiful October hue that only lasts a little while after sunset. The trees were dark against the fading light, and there was just enough chill in the air to make me pull my sweater tighter while stubbornly refusing to admit I should probably go inside.

I sat there thinking about the year so far. The things I’d hoped would happen, the things that actually happened and the astonishing number of things I never saw coming. Some made me smile. Some still annoyed the hell out of me. A few were wonderful surprises, and others I could have happily lived without.

But for the first time that day, nothing needed an immediate answer. I wasn’t trying to fix anything or figure out what came next. I was simply sitting in the middle of a life that had become what it was through a thousand different moments, decisions, disappointments and unexpected pleasures.

October has a way of making time visible. The daylight disappears earlier, the trees change almost overnight, and the world outside begins settling into the next part of the Wheel. It doesn’t stop to congratulate itself on a successful season or apologize for a disappointing one. It simply moves on, carrying the consequences of everything that happened before.

And as Samhain approaches, I find myself thinking a little less about how much I have and a little more about what I’ve been making room for. Not in some grand, spiritually enlightened fashion. I’m still perfectly capable of saying yes to something ridiculous on a Tuesday and regretting it by Friday.

Eventually the cold won, and I went back inside. The dogs followed, dinner still needed attention, and tomorrow’s list was waiting exactly where I’d left it. Nothing had magically resolved itself while I sat outside contemplating the mysteries of abundance.

Still, I had to laugh. I’d spent so much of the year wanting things to happen, and now that they had, I was complaining about having too much to do.

Apparently, abundance had arrived. It just hadn’t bothered to dress for the occasion.

And as another October carries us toward Samhain, I’m reminded that a harvest doesn’t always look like something worth celebrating. Sometimes it’s more than we can handle, sometimes it’s less than we hoped for, and sometimes the very thing we thought would be wonderful turns out to require a whole lot more work than we bargained for.

I can’t tell you what next year’s harvest will bring, but I suspect I’ll be a little more careful about what I invite into my life.

Because apparently everything doesn’t have to be wonderful to be abundant, and just because something grows doesn’t mean I want a whole lot more of it next year.