Onward to Match! - 1-11-09

My mother told me something I hadn’t heard before about using the Secret. She said one of the Secret teachers, Mike Dooley, recommends to visualize for five minutes at a time, no more, then let it go. That sometimes if you visualize for a long time, the opposite effect can sometimes be brought about, like when I was driving to Analiese’s Game Night last weekend and trying to visualize a good time and only getting more depressed about everything. When Mom shared that with me, I couldn’t see how I could pull that off. How could I not visualize all day long, even until my brain is twitching exhaustedly and all higher functions are blurred? Visualization was the only coping strategy I had to get through my life, even when it stopped working and I had lost all conviction in it. What was I to do with my brain then?

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I couldn’t see how it was to be accomplished, but I thought about it and that brought it about – a reminder of how the Secret works. It was that effortless; it didn’t even feel like I had done anything. But slowly, I started to let the visualizing and thought go. And I found in doing this that that must have been what had been stymieing the Secret for so many weeks. I was visualizing so hard because I thought I was more responsible for bringing my future to me than I was. Again. I didn’t believe that simple thought and desire would bring it all about, so I began working at visualization. And only working harder with every passing day at work. Desperate to get out.

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And it occurred to me, on the tearful even of my return to work after my winter break, that, more than all the things I wanted that I was visualizing so hard, what I really, truly wanted was to be happy again. I couldn’t remember what that felt like. The last time I had been happy was last summer, drenched with the glorious heat, full up with hope and satisfaction. And it had been so long I had literally forgot what it felt like to be happy. What I really wanted was to feel good, to be happy. I wanted to have something to look forward to. My life had become something to get through. Every day, my thought is “Let’s just get through this day” and each day ends with a dull relief that one more day is behind me. Meanwhile, my life is whizzing by, but I can’t slow down long enough to enjoy anything because then I’ll also be aware of my unchanging misery. The art of walking on a bed of coals is not to slow down or you’ll get burned, and my spirit was already constantly uncomfortably warm.

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So in my bed the night before my return to that hated place, I wept with the desperate thought that this has to change, sooner or later. That is the only constant in life – change. I cannot be 35 or 40 or 53 and still working at Newsome Park. Sooner or later – and I had already braced myself for “later” – my life, my circumstances have to change. And I wept with the broken thought that I want to look forward to my life. I had already a few days before made the resolution to have more fun in 2009. Life has become a drudgery and I want 2009 to be so much better than 2008. And yet here I was, a mere two days after that hopeful resolution, weighed down with my misery.

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So it is a relief that I actually have been remembering what it’s like to visualize and let it go. That is faith. That is releasing control you don’t have in the first place. And it felt good. Some of the burden lifted. A chink in my prison wall let in some light on my bleached face.

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Maybe that’s why I woke up this morning and unexplainably couldn’t find the stone dread that always accompanies the thought of dating or a dating service. Maybe that’s why I was able to go through my whole day with that unfamiliar lack and sign up for Match.com and make my whole profile with hardly a whisper of anxiety. Maybe that’s why I rediscovered “Meet Joe Black” and was finally able to remember the vision of my perfect mate to hold to. Maybe that’s why I finally got so tired of being alone and lonely, starved and childless. Maybe that’s why I finally let go of the how.

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I don’t give a damn if my perfect mate is on a dating service or not. Would I like a better story? Yes. Do I care, though? Not anymore. This life I’m so eager to push behind me with a nice check-mark at the top is leaving me behind. I want to be the bride. I want to be the pregnant mother at the baby shower. I want it. I’m sick of being left behind. I want to join the human race.