On the Subtle Drift from Abundance to Fairness

For much of my life, I’ve tried to operate from a posture of abundance. Not the abundance of material excess, but the deeper kind—the abundance of spirit, of possibility, of generosity. It shaped how I gave my time, how I built relationships, how I led. It wasn’t strategic—it was simply how I saw the world: that value could be created by lifting, by offering, by extending beyond the immediate calculus of transaction.

But recently, I’ve noticed a shift. A slow drift driven by a selections of factors. Somewhere along the way, I began reaching for fairness instead.

At first, it seemed reasonable—fairness is, after all, socially accepted as a virtue. But as I leaned into it, I began to feel a tightening. Fairness became a way of tracking, measuring, accounting. It quietly turned into a kind of scorekeeping. Who gave what? Who took too much? What is owed, and by whom? Beneath it all was a growing sense of being extracted from. Of having given too much for too little in return.

What once felt like a boundless field started to feel like a closed system—defined by scarcity, defended by principle.

And yet, when I sit with it, I realize that this shift toward fairness—however emotionally justified—has left me heavier, not lighter and left me extracted from. It’s given me the language of grievance but taken away the feeling of agency. It’s offered me the symmetry of justice, but not the freedom of generativity.

I’m just beginning to remember: abundance isn’t naïve. It’s not passive. It’s a discipline. A choice to lead with openness even when you’ve been bruised. A refusal to let the world’s extractive tendencies dictate the terms of your giving. When I act through abundance, I don’t feel drained—I feel expanded. The burden lifts. The sense of being wronged dissolves, not because the wrong never happened, but because it no longer owns me.

The challenge now is not to return to some naïve optimism, but to re-root in that deeper abundance—with eyes open. To protect its generative power, not by retreating into fairness, or discerning of who deserves abundance but by becoming and enjoying the being of abundance in flows.

Fairness may keep the score. But abundance changes the game. Leadership perhaps can ONLY exist in abundance - everything else is management.