I grew up in Abundance. Not with but in.

Abundance was plenty of food on grandma’s large dining table on the veranda of the inner courtyard; it was effusive love from all relatives, neighbors, and friends; it was ceaseless generosity by all; it was the constant receiving of gifts from almost everybody who visited our family; it was too much noise, and laughter, and loud arguments, and politics, and …

I first observed Abundance in my external world, but then internalized and experienced it as a reality of life within. I was immersed in it. And as a fish swimming in the sea that cannot see the water, being immersed in Abundance, I was not aware of it. It was my natural state-of-being-immersed-in. Like the fish that knows not it is struggling to swim as it carves a path through the water, I knew not that I was moving and acting in Abundance. It had become a natural given of Life, like the air I breathed.

My maternal grandma Zoe (aptly meaning “Life” in Greek!), the biggest influence in the first six years of my life, was the very embodiment of Abundance: Weighing 120 kilos, she would walk with difficulty about her house in which I used to spend most of my time. At night, I would curl up next to her bosom between her and my grandpa, and my mother would always worry she would turn over in her sleep and squash me! Half the day she was above the stovetop, cooking enough food to feed a regiment. She would always assume that whoever visited her home was hungry and would press them to eat. That was often a correct assumption, since many truly were hungry and came there to eat – Zoe was a legendary cook! Therefore, grandma cooked way more food than necessary and threw the leftovers away or gave them to the chickens and cats. She was quite wasteful, and I grew up in such wastefulness. Same with the fruit: So many fruits at home every day, so we were never left without a big choice – not least because grandpa Andrea, who was a high school teacher, became a farmer after retirement and had planted orange groves, watermelon fields, and more. For the rest of the day, Zoe would be immersed in housework activities, all of which were in some form or another also … wasteful: spilling tons of water on the verandas to cool down the summer heat, wasting the huge green classic olive soaps when doing our laundry by rubbing the clothes with her bare hands (so they would always smell nice), throwing away the flowers in the vases as soon as they showed the first sign of withering to replace them with fresh ones, and so on. But let me be clear: My parents and grandparents were not wealthy at that time. They were normal middle-class families. The wastefulness was wholly cultural. Other families in the small town of Morphou in Cyprus behaved in a similar fashion. And when grandma Zoe would become a refugee after the Turkish invasion in 1974, she would continue behaving in exactly the same way!

Of all the many experiences of Abundance, the one I would dare say defined my early childhood were the huge dinner tables where guests were, as a rule, always present. Zoe would cook many different dishes, and we all ate so much that, in the end, we could not breathe! As long as you kept eating all the food on your plate, grandma would assume you still wanted more and would add more to your plate (or, if you sat at the other end of the table, she would ask a relative to do it on her behalf). Every time she saw an empty plate, an alarm rang in her brain and she had to fill it up again. The only way to stop her from … forcefully feeding you was to leave some food on your plate and loudly proclaim that you would “explode” – the standard compliment to Zoe’s cooking and an implicit expression of gratitude! Therefore, at the end of each meal, you would see not only food remaining on all plates (an indication that everybody had had enough), but also plenty of food in the huge serving bowls and platters. Not a single dish on the table was ever truly empty!

These huge dinners with lots of people and an endless supply of food, drinks, and fruit, again, were something I took for granted without ever realizing its cultural uniqueness. The image of the full dinner table with an endless supply of food would mark my whole youth and beyond. But at the age of 24, a very small and apparently insignificant incident happened that shook my natural state-of-being-immersed-in-Abundance. And aptly enough, since I started with the fish analogy, it happened … at a lunch table involving fish!

In 1986, after my studies in London, I had moved to the then-West Berlin to live for a year with my German girlfriend. After we had settled down in our new rental apartment, she told me that it was a family tradition to have fish for lunch at her grandma’s home every Thursday. And so we went, with my girlfriend’s parents and sister. Grandma Gertha soon presented the platters with the fish fillets and a bowl of boiled vegetables and potatoes. She served a fillet to each one of us. The fillet was so small, I immediately assumed it would be the first dish of a multicourse meal that would probably include a huge whole fish later on and other goodies. So I started eating quickly, but then noticed that everybody else was eating quite slowly, and I slowed down. The fillet of fish on my plate would have been one of five starters at Zoe’s table, and would then be followed by another three or four main dishes all served simultaneously after the starters. But I soon realized that … “Oh my God, this is all the food we are eating today!” This tiny piece of fish with vegetables, which at that age, with my endless energy, I would have devoured in less than a minute as a starter, was not only the main meal, but the whole meal! Suddenly, I had to become self-conscious of my actions. And as the fish in the Sea of Abundance that I was, I decided not to show I was still hungry and could eat a whole 5-kilo grouper by myself, but to pretend I had had more than enough and was full by leaving a small piece of fish in my plate (“please, no more food on my plate grandma Zoe/Gertha, I will explode!”).

On the way back home, my girlfriend was grumpy and then suddenly turned at me and angrily exclaimed, “Why didn’t you like my grandma’s fish? What was wrong with it?”

“But I did like it! Why do you say that?” I responded with a puzzled look on my face.

“So why did you leave fish and vegetables on your plate? Why didn’t you eat all your food?” she shouted.

“Well, because I wanted to show my appreciation by showing I had had enough and couldn’t eat more!” I said apologetically.

“Are you serious? I know you are still hungry because grandma’s portions, who lived through WWII, are a bit small. If you leave food on your plate in Germany, it means you didn’t like it; it doesn’t mean you are full!” she said. I was dumbfounded. Here I was, a fish out of water, in this new land, discovering that leaving food on your plate is not an expression of gratitude, but, well, an expression of ingratitude! My whole fish-universe had collapsed because of a few grams of fish I had left on my plate.

For days and months, I would think about this incident, which also ended up being my first true lesson in cultural opposites – that what is best practice in one culture may be the worst in another. And I would often recall this incident when, many years later, I was traveling around the world, always being mindful of the cultural differences and nuances in the countries I visited.

Three years after that fateful day in West Berlin, the Berlin Wall came down, shattering more worlds and more lives than my small fish world of Abundance. But this was a great opportunity to meditate on the true nature of Abundance. I thought it would be best to start by finding the opposite of the concept, since this exercise had often helped me in delving deeper into any idea. But it was not an easy task, and it would take many years until I figured it out. Abundance is bountifulness, profusion, largeness – as large as grandma Zoe! At first, I thought that its opposite was Scarcity or Deprivation or Thriftiness or maybe even Poverty. Well, this line of thought may be credible if we refer to the material aspect of Abundance. But Abundance for me was rather a state of being, an existential reality that did not simply depend on wealth and material goods. Therefore, it couldn’t be scarcity or deprivation. If these two occur, it is an unfortunate strike of Fate, but it is not a conscious attitude, a stance, an inner reality of experience. I understood that there were people and families who were poor and living in scarcity, but I felt that this was beyond their control, so it could not define a state of being because it was transitory– a poor family could become wealthy. This analysis was augmented by my (by then) clear understanding that grandma Gertha was not stingy or miserly. Germans are not stingy, and definitely not poor or miserable – they are the wealthiest nation in Europe. And it couldn’t be thriftiness – Gertha may have been thrifty during WWII but could easily have cooked larger pieces of fish in the late 1980s. After many years of brooding on the subject, one day I finally cracked the code:

What is the real opposite of Abundance? It is Sufficiency.

The German (and Northern European) mentality is that everybody receives what they need, what is sufficient for them. Two hundred grams of fish, three mini potatoes, and a few vegetables on the plate are sufficient to have a normal meal. One need not overstuff one’s stomach with more, and one definitely need not throw away food.

Now I could finally see the sea-water of my naturally immersed-in state of Abundance through a new lens (from the opposite side): Gertha’s world of Sufficiency did not allow for any wastefulness. It was a meticulously planned and disciplined world in which every piece fit like a jigsaw puzzle within an intricate system of rational decisions. But Zoe’s world of Abundance, imitating Life itself, was full of wastefulness because it threw out into the world its own spontaneous profusion and allowed the world to then absorb what it wanted according to its own needs and modes of behavior. I understand that it is through limiting, taming, and Channeling [1] the abundance of Nature that we transform and create our human world. And that nations with discipline and organization, like Germany and Japan, have created so much of the music, philosophy, literature, science, and technology of our modern world.

Yet, my grandmother’s wastefulness was neither as irrational nor as undisciplined and chaotic as it may at first seem. It seems so only when we limit our view to a small area of activity. But my grandma would always find ways to make good use of the food that remained on the dinner table. She would send some to neighbors or feed the visiting guests the next day, or the cats and chickens, thereby minimizing the quantity she threw away. Seen this way, nothing was ever truly wasted. Even the food my grandma threw away was certainly eaten by some other animals … ants, worms, mice, cockroaches. Or it went back into the soil and turned into compost to feed the plants and trees. Nothing is ever truly wasted.

We should not be afraid of wastefulness, for it is irrevocably connected to the modes of Nature and Life that reside in Abundance. Nature is extremely wasteful: All the rain and fresh water of the rivers goes into the sea and vanishes so that we need to create dams to collect and use it. Every male animal produces millions of sperms every time it ejaculates, only for very few to ever fertilize an egg. Likewise, every woman produces an egg every month but will only have a few children in her lifetime. And young animals are so vulnerable that few survive their first year: Through its boundless profusion and ceaseless creation, Nature causes myriad deaths every day. But these young animals in turn are eaten by other animals, so their Death becomes the nourishment of Life. Similarly, a fruit tree produces way more fruit every summer than the nearby animals can possibly eat. Abundance is Life itself! Even in inanimate Nature, we see an immense profusion of galaxies and stars and planets in order for one out of millions to end up having Life appear on it. The whole Universe is wasteful because it too lives in Abundance. The normal state of things, the substratum on which we are called to move and be, the sea in which we are immersed, is one of Abundance, profusion, wastefulness.

Abundance is the natural state of the Universe and Life.