When life gives you one lemon🍋, use its seeds to plant lemon trees🌳 and grow your own garden.
There was a time in my life when living felt like squeezing a lemon — until the last drop. I’m talking about holding a lemon so tight, twisting it, pressing it against every edge and surface just to make sure not a single drop goes to waste. That’s how I approached life. That’s how I handled money, opportunities, decisions. Carefully, anxiously, with a mindset rooted in lack.
Every decision was filtered through:
“How can I make this stretch?”
Not: “How can I multiply this?”
Looking back at those days, I recently had this image flash in my mind: me — squeezing one lemon dry — while somewhere else, someone is walking freely through a whole lemon garden. Not worried. Not anxious. Not fearful that they’ll run out. Because they know the trees will bloom again. They live in a mindset of abundance. I did not
That’s poverty consciousness. It’s not about how much money you have — it’s about how you think. It’s what makes someone stretch $100 over 30 days for survival instead of asking,
“What portion of this $100 can I invest where it can multiply?”
Because here’s the truth — people on food stamps, people earning meagre salaries, people surviving on minimums are not always poor by lack of effort or talent. Many of us are surviving in systems that taught us to hoard, shrink, defer, and never expect more. Systems that taught us survival is the highest goal. It is not. There is a difference between being broke and being trapped in poverty consciousness.
Let me hit you with another truth, you get to think that life is forever what it is now, or envision what it could be and let that image guide your decisions.
One is temporary. The other is a mindset that can last a lifetime — unless we break it.
That mindset says:
- “It’s not safe to invest.”
- “I must make this little bit last forever.”
- “I can’t afford to take risks.”
- “Money is hard to come by and easy to lose.”
But what if we started asking:
- “What would someone with a lemon garden do?”
- “What if this $100 isn’t for survival — but for liberation?”
- “What if I could plant seeds, not just preserve scraps?”
Poverty consciousness shrinks your dreams down to the size of your wallet.
Abundance mindset expands your reality to the size of your vision.
Journal Prompts 🍋🖊
- What are the areas in my life where I still squeeze the lemon, afraid to waste even a drop?
- Have I ever said “I can’t afford that” without even trying to find a way?
- What does my “lemon garden” look like? What does abundance mean to me?
- Where in my life have, I been afraid to invest in myself, even in small ways?
- If I believed more money would come, how would I live differently today?
The world taught us to endure and survive. But we were meant to create. To plant. To bloom.
Stop squeezing. Start planting. The garden is within you.
Salima
Just me thinking out loud over here