The Life You’re Already Building
By Jonni Dee | Sweet Freedom Living
When most people hear the word abundance, their minds go straight to money. More income, more security, more possessions, more of the tangible things that feel like proof that life is going well. And I understand that. For a long time, I thought about it that way too.
But somewhere along the way, my understanding of abundance shifted. Not because my circumstances changed dramatically, but because my thinking did. I began to realize that abundance isn’t really about what we have. It’s about what we believe. And more specifically, it’s about the quality of the choices we make when we’re operating from that belief.
This is the idea I keep coming back to, turning it over in my mind from different angles: that the life we’re living right now isn’t primarily shaped by our big decisions. It’s shaped by the small ones we make every single day. And whether we realize it or not, every one of those choices is answering a deeper question about who we are and what we believe is possible for us.
What Scarcity Actually Sounds Like
A few weeks ago, I found myself caught in a very ordinary version of scarcity thinking, and it caught me completely off guard.
If you’ve ever shopped the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale, you know what I’m talking about. Women spend weeks curating wish lists, saving their favorite items in preparation for the moment their shopping window opens. Some stay up until midnight to get a jump on things. Some add everything they might possibly want to their cart and sort it out later. The whole event creates this low-grade urgency that’s genuinely hard to resist, even when you know it’s happening.
I had been watching a pair of jeans for days. By the time my access opened, they were gone — sold out in my size, unavailable for shipping, completely out of reach. For a moment, I felt that familiar sting of disappointment. The thought that flashed through my mind was something like: I missed my chance.
Then I walked into the store later that day. And there they were. My size. Right there on the rack, as if they’d been waiting for me.
I laughed out loud, right there in the middle of the store with my friend and the sales associate. Not because I was thrilled about finding a pair of jeans, but because I’d been so vividly reminded of something I already knew and had momentarily forgotten: scarcity tells us we have to grab what we can before it disappears. Abundance reminds us there is almost always another way.
What strikes me about the Anniversary Sale, if you watch it long enough, is what happens a few days after opening. The returns start coming in. Items that seemed impossible to find suddenly reappear. Sizes that sold out on day one steadily come back into stock. The women who were willing to wait, who trusted that what they were looking for would still be there, often end up with exactly what they wanted — without the scramble, without the anxiety, without the three bags they had to return the following week.
Life works a lot like that, if we’re paying attention.
How often do we rush into decisions because we’re afraid another opportunity won’t come? How often do we say yes out of fear that someone else will get there first, or settle because we’ve convinced ourselves this is our only chance? I’ve started to wonder whether fear of missing out is really just fear of not having enough — enough opportunities, enough time, enough possibility, enough faith that what is meant for us will find its way to us, even if it doesn’t arrive on our timetable.
Abundance mindset doesn’t promise that we’ll get everything we want. But it does free us from the exhausting belief that every opportunity is our last one.
The Question Underneath Every Choice
Several mornings ago, I laced up my walking shoes before the sun came up. If you live in Arizona, you understand the strategy. By the time the rest of the world is enjoying its first cup of coffee, we’re already in a race against the heat. The window for a comfortable morning walk gets narrower as the summer wears on, which means the alarm goes off earlier and earlier, and some mornings it takes everything I have to get out of bed and honor the commitment I’ve made to myself.
There are days when I don’t want to go. Days when the bed is comfortable and the morning is cool and I can think of approximately twelve reasonable justifications for staying put. And the truth is, missing one walk probably doesn’t change much. My health isn’t going to noticeably suffer from a single skipped morning.
But I’ve come to understand that it was never really about the walk.
Every time I face that choice — stay in bed or lace up my shoes — I’m answering a question that has very little to do with exercise. The question is this: who am I honoring today? Am I honoring the woman who believes her health matters enough to keep the promises she makes to herself? Or am I honoring the part of me that defaults to comfort when commitment feels inconvenient? Am I succumbing to the reasonable excuse?
That question has genuinely changed the way I think about almost everything.
What I’ve realized is that every choice we make strengthens an identity. Every time I keep a promise to myself, I support the woman who trusts herself. Every time I honor my need for rest — actually rest, without guilt — I honor the woman who believes her wellbeing matters. Every time I say no to something that pulls me away from the life I’m intentionally building, I support the woman whose choices are guided by her values rather than her fears.
And every time I override those things — every time I push through when my body needs rest, say yes when I mean no, or abandon a commitment to myself because something else feels more urgent — I reinforce the opposite.
I think about this often when I’m tempted to believe that freedom is something that arrives later. When life settles down. When the responsibilities ease up. When I finally have more time, more energy, more bandwidth. It’s such a convincing story, and I’ve told it to myself more times than I can count.
But what if freedom isn’t waiting for us at the end of some future road? What if it’s actually being built — or undermined — by the choices we’re making right now, today?
The Life Your Choices Are Building
Here’s the question I’ve been sitting with lately, and I want to offer it to you as well: have you stopped recently to look at the life your daily choices are actually creating?
Not the life you hope to have someday, or the life you’re planning for when things settle down. The life that is taking shape right now, in real time, through the accumulation of decisions most people wouldn’t consider particularly significant.
It’s easy to believe our lives are shaped by the big moments. The promotion, the move, the milestone birthday, the relationship you never expected, the decision to finally start the thing we’ve been putting off. Those moments are real and they matter. But I’ve come to believe they aren’t actually what shapes us most. What shapes us most is far more ordinary than that.
It’s whether we take the walk or stay in bed. Whether we keep the appointment we made with ourselves or simply cancel it. Whether we set a boundary and hold it or say yes again because it’s easier. Whether we choose presence or distraction. Whether we call the friend we’ve been meaning to call, rest when we’re tired instead of pushing through, or say no without spending the rest of the day apologizing for it.
None of those choices feel particularly significant in the moment. But they’re not isolated events. They’re a pattern. And the pattern, over time, becomes a life.
I’ve also come to believe that abundance, real abundance, is less about what we accumulate and more about the way we travel. It’s a mindset that says there is enough — enough time, enough grace, enough opportunity, enough love, enough possibility — that we don’t have to live from a place of scarcity and fear. We don’t have to grab at everything that passes by. We don’t have to say yes to things we don’t want because we’re afraid of what we’ll miss if we say no. We don’t have to keep running at a pace that leaves us too depleted to enjoy what we’ve already created.
And here’s the part that shifts everything: when we actually believe there is enough, our choices change. We start making decisions from clarity instead of fear. We start protecting the things that matter most instead of giving our best to everything and everyone until there’s nothing left for ourselves. We start building something that feels like freedom, not someday, but now.
The Day That Tells the Truth
I’ve started asking myself a different question when I’m thinking about my life. Not “what do I need to accomplish?” but “what kind of life am I creating?”
The answer to that question isn’t found on my calendar or in my productivity system. It’s found in the texture of an ordinary day. In whether I move my body before the heat sets in, or talk myself out of it (or, as in these hotter days, choose another way to get the job done.) In whether I pick up the phone and have the real conversation or keep meaning to and never quite getting there. In whether I put the phone down at dinner, pray before I start the day, or rest on a Saturday afternoon without guilt.
These are the choices that reveal who we are beneath the mask. Not the dramatic decisions, but the daily ones.
And I think this is where the idea of abundance becomes most practical. Because an abundant mindset doesn’t just change how we feel about life. It changes how we live it. It frees us to say no to the things that drain us without believing we’ve lost something irreplaceable. It frees us to wait for the right opportunity instead of grabbing the first one out of fear. It frees us to keep promises to ourselves, to rest, to create, to move slowly enough that we’re actually present for the life that’s unfolding.
Every boundary we set either creates more peace or more resentment — it depends on whether we set it from clarity or obligation. Every act of generosity either builds gratitude or fuels comparison — it depends on whether we’re giving from abundance or performing from scarcity. Every yes we offer either opens a door or closes one — and knowing which is which requires us to slow down long enough to ask.
This is the work I find most meaningful. Not helping women create entirely different lives, but helping them look honestly at the lives they’re already creating — and make more intentional choices about where they go from here.
What Abundance Is Actually Asking
As I’ve been sitting with all of this, I keep coming back to one simple truth: abundance isn’t the destination. It’s the way we travel.
It’s the belief that there is enough grace for the mistakes we’ve made and enough possibility for what comes next. It’s the conviction that another opportunity will come, that what is meant for us doesn’t expire, that the life we want to build is still available to us — one intentional choice at a time. (To which I hear the Spirit whisper, “All in God’s time.”)
So, this month, I want to offer you a few questions to carry with you.
When you’re faced with a decision — big or small — pause for just a moment and ask yourself: am I making this choice because I’m afraid of missing out, or because it genuinely moves me toward the life I’m trying to create? Am I acting from scarcity or from abundance? Am I honoring the ‘real me,” or defaulting to the pattern that’s easiest?
Those questions lead to very different answers. And over time, those answers lead to very different lives.
The life you want isn’t waiting for you on the other side of some future season. It’s being shaped right now, by the choices you’re making today.
Make them count.
