Growing Up on a Tightrope

I grew up walking on a tightrope and (thankfully) never knew it.

If you haven't read it, I highly recommend "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success" by Carol Dweck. Dweck makes an inspired case for both the growth and limits we create for ourselves based on subconscious mental frameworks.

In my understanding, those with a growth mindset experience life as a place of nearly limitless potential where - with the application of time and effort - change sought is a change wrought. As said in The Terminator, "The future is not set. There is no fate, but we make for ourselves."

This is completely unlike the fixed mindset, which assumes a more static world, one where outcomes are more often than not predetermined, and any efforts to create real change are not cost-efficient. The fixed mindset person will often argue that 'the juice is not worth the squeeze' because they assume they really can't change the circumstances they exist in.

We each have portions of these mindsets that compete for balance in our lives. After reading the book, I started assessing my own experience, balancing my own distribution of growth and fixed mindsets. During my reflection, I came to consider if they were not just manifestations of what I have come to think of as a more fundamental pair of mindset-shaping subconscious frameworks.

For many years, I have believed that at some time in early development, each of us develops a particularly pernicious unconscious belief that the world is either one of abundance or one of scarcity.

I call it pernicious because these beliefs subconsciously justify and reinforce one's life choices. The effects of those ripple through one's life in a cascade of outcomes, the source of which for most of us is based on a subconscious perspective of the world and the assumptions that follow, made largely without consideration. While a direct correlation would be hard to prove, I believe that having a mindset of scarcity would most likely lead one to a fixed mindset, whereas a mindset of abundance could more likely lead one to a growth mindset.

I spent my early life in a lovely suburban town. The kind of place people moved to so their kids could go to a better-than-average school. We had a house with forced air heating (and cooling!) and a big yard that I loathed to mow and rake. We had two wonderful red maples in the front yard that I would curse at each fall. My early years were often playing outside in the yard or in the acres and acres of woods behind our fence. I could ride my bike or walk down the streets of the neighborhood any time of day or night.

My paternal grandparents owned a large restaurant nearby where my mother and father worked as a waitress and bartender, respectively. I now regret not having a better understanding of everything that transpired, but I know that so many things changed suddenly when my grandfather passed suddenly of a heart attack. But my first big memory from this time was my grandmother selling the restaurant.

I don't remember how long it was that my father got another job working for The State of Rhode Island, and my mother focused on teaching and selling ceramics and other artistic pursuits. She even returned to school to pursue her interests in archeology, anthropology, physical history, and cultures. I started understanding that my father was drinking, but I didn't yet know what an alcoholic was. I was aware of my parents fighting, and one night, when I couldn't handle the tension, I got out of bed and encouraged them to divorce just so the fighting would stop. Not that I want the credit or the blame, but shortly thereafter they did. My father moved into his mother's condo's second bedroom, and my mother and I stayed in the house. This was around the time I developed an inkling that the money situation was potentially unstable and certainly imbalanced in our household/s. My father was able to afford a skilled attorney, and his eventual financial obligations to my mother and me were so little I remember her saying it barely covered what I ate in groceries for a week.

In the following years, my mother did everything she could to keep up with the bills. Sometimes working away from home for four or five days a week at craft fairs all over the Northeast. Juggling which bills would get paid when falling behind on the mortgage, and being under the stress of managing all of life as a parent and as a person weighed on her, but she shielded me from almost all of it. I knew things were particularly bad when we 'went on vacation'. Vacations for us meant ice cream sundaes, sometimes a shared one. They were our escapes together and meant the world to both of us. (Still does!) Those were the times when she might give me a glimpse of the strain she was under. This may be one of the reasons my instinct is to self-reward with food, but that's another blog.

I'm skimming over the details and not sharing a hundred other things that 'went wrong' in my childhood. But, I am sharing all of this because, despite everything that started falling apart in my world between ten and thirteen years old, I still - to this day - believe I am blessed with a mindset of abundance. I see opportunities in almost everything. I see the potential (sometimes the negative potential) in people, places, and things. I don't usually see the world as a static, unalterable place but as a place for experimentation and for trying new things.

I attribute this to years of love from a large family, the freedom I had to explore the woods unaccompanied as a child, and the encouragement my creativity received from my mother. On weekends when I would stay at my father's (really my grandmother's until she passed), she would send me with a shoebox full of craft supplies and other tidbits that I could cut and glue and tape and tie into whatever my mind could imagine. A few years ago, I heard that there is now a business that does this very thing, a subscription service to have imagination boxes sent to kids on a regular basis. Like so many artistic and creative things, my mom tended to have the idea first.

There are a million reasons why I should see the world from a place of scarcity. I've lived out of my car. I've lived week to week for most of my life. I can see and get angry at systemic wealth inequality, and yet, I never feel like positive change is impossible. Hell, I usually feel like it's just around the corner. I guess this ties in with my "Hope is a Renewable Resource" blog in a sense. That said, I can't stop myself from looking at a pile of furniture on the side of the road because my assumption is still that other people's trash is probably better than what I have at home. When someone says, 'I have XYZ that I'm going to throw out,' my inner squirrel starts shouting that I should take it and store it away for that one time 5 years from now... Like I said earlier, we all have proportions of these mindsets that we need to recognize and decide which to prune and which to water. Having both the language to describe and the motivation to reflect and identify is wonderful.

Often when I get to the end of a blog post like this, I think... is this like the ending to Game of Thrones? Did I have 7 great paragraphs and then burn down the whole countryside for the 8th? Let me know, if you have read this far, what you think about abundance versus scarcity mindsets and growth versus fixed. Email me at Brad@BAHIH.org, or comment on my FB post if that's where you found it! Thank you for reading.