fear

I’m someone who advocates taking a front row seat in your own life, however…

A friend sent this to me yesterday.

“I’m generally a positive person and I don’t believe in worrying about something that hasn’t happened. That makes no sense to me. Last night I went to a movie, for the first hour I lived in fear that someone would come in to do terrible things. I noted all the exits and although we were in the front row (which was not ideal for my mental state) I was ready to run or get down. To calm myself, I began wishing that some random person came up to this troubled person earlier in the day and said something kind that made him rethink how wonderful the world is and change his evil plan. Sometimes that is all it takes.

That’s a horrible way to live. No one should have to live in fear.”

I agree. No one should have to live in fear…or exacerbate it by sitting in the front row of a megaplex just inches away from a jumbo screen. That is cruel and abusive behavior and I’ve always believed there should be a front-row intervention. Seriously. Those people cannot actually want that level of sensory stimulation! It’s inhumane.

To my friend: The world is a wonderful place fifteen rows behind you. Trust me on this. If you suffer from anxiety for an hour, you should get up and leave. Or buy tickets for another time when you can get a proper seat.

Another friend called to tell me about a birthday party gone awry while I drove to pick up glitter for my magic wands (because I sit in the very last row, where the world truly IS a wonderful place.)

It went something like this: Her sister and several other birthday party moms were standing around a local park late last Saturday afternoon debating the GOP convention, terrorist threats, police killings, white dresses with puffy sleeves and self-tanning tragedies while watching a dozen twelve-year-old boys systematically destroy every inch of flora and fauna in the immediate vicinity—when the sound of rapid fire gunshots filled the air.

Four of the moms hit the deck. Two peed their pants. Literally.

Turns out the gunfire was only bubble pack from a pile of discarded gift wrapping. It was being stepped on by two of their sons who got in big, big, trouble.
Wait.  
We’ve all done that. Twisting or stomping on bubble packing is a twelve-years old’s right of passage. It’s up there with inhaling helium and singing Bohemian Rhapsody (although I’m sure the song choice has changed and that makes me sad because today’s twelve-year old’s will never know the sheer perfection of singing “Scaramouche, scaramouch, will you do the Fandango?” with lungs full of helium. It is a laugh like no other. Even though I was actually in high-school my first time, I will never forget it.)

Mistaking bubble wrap for gunfire would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Okay, it’s still a little funny.

Anyway, all this to say, everybody seems a bit edgy these days.

Fear has replaced oxygen in the air supply and we all just need to hold our breath chill.

Maybe we need less stimulation right now.
Less loud music and violent movies played at full volume.
Less front row.
Less talk of guns and terrorists and how we’re not safe in our country anymore.

I grew up as a kid practicing “duck and cover” drills which were a very clever way to dodge the effects of a nuclear bomb blast because as everyone knows, radiation doesn’t go under school desks. In the 1960’s the possibility of a nuclear war seemed imminent. The end of the world really WAS at hand and even at six years old we figured out how to cope—we still played at recess and swam and built a fort and went to the movies and waited for bubble wrap to be invented so we could pop it obnoxiously in each other faces. We had fun.

It’s gonna be okay you guys. There’s no need to be so scared. You have control over your environment and what you watch.

No one should have to live in fear. That’s a horrible way to live. And a terrible waste of time.

Carry on,
xox

Sounds counterintuitive. Right?

But if we armour up, we fall prey to exactly what the cruel ones want. We turn on each other…

What a fucking nightmare of a week this has been.

But remember.

The world is not cruel. Only a few.

Say that again.

The WORLD is not cruel—only an angry few who view things as so hopeless that they see no way out other than violence.

Anger is sad’s bodyguard, remember?

Be courageous. Try to stay in your heart.

Get angry—then get back to your heart.

Be sad—then find your way back to your heart.

Feel hopeless—then search for love. That’s what I’m attempting this weekend.

Carry on,
xox

This is a recent essay by Liz Gilbert and it’s just so damn good I had to share it with you guys.
xox

Take it away, Liz!

Dear Ones –
The other day, I was talking with someone on this page about how to walk through the world with “an undefended heart”.
This person was saying that she wants so much to live with an open and undefended heart, but then it always happens that people hurt her and attack her when they see that she is open. She doesn’t want to leave herself vulnerable to that sort of pain. So she shuts down. Understandably.

So what is to be done?

How do we live open-hearted lives without being victims of constant attack?

Allow me to introduce you to the Alpha Mare.
This is an idea that came to me through my beloved friend Martha Beck, who explained to me how the psychology of a herd of horses works. At the top of the hierarchy of a herd of horses, there is an alpha mare. She is the leader. (Stallions come and go, but the mare is in charge of the herd forever.) All the other horses look to her, in order to know what to do and how to feel. As long as she remains calm, the rest of the herd feels calm. And the alpha mare is always calm, because her boundaries are AIRTIGHT. She knows exactly who she is, and nobody messes with it. Nobody approaches the alpha mare without her invitation. Nobody imposes themselves upon the alpha mare against her will. The alpha mare never lets herself be influenced by another horse’s fears or anxieties or aggression. She knows what the right thing to do is, and she does it. Everyone else follows. She doesn’t need anyone’s approval for anything. She doesn’t need anyone’s permission. She lives and breathes from a place of integrity and certainty, because of her strong and appropriate boundaries. And as a result, SHE IS ALWAYS RELAXED.

And because she is relaxed, everyone around her is RELAXED.
Thus the whole herd can live safely and peacefully around her, with undefended hearts, and the alpha mare’s heart is undefended, too.
It is fear that makes you defend your heart, but once you have discovered appropriate boundaries, you do not need to live in constant fear.

Until you learn how to hold appropriate boundaries, and stand in integrity, and speak your truth, you will never have a relaxed moment in your life. You will live like a fugitive, always on the run, always hiding, always afraid of being exposed.

A heart without healthy and appropriate boundaries can only suffer in a constant state of anxiety and defense — vigilant against the next attack,helpless against other people’s will.

To live with an undefended heart does NOT mean that you walk out in the world like a helpless child, wide-open and boundary-less, and you just let anyone do anything to you that they please. That is not openness; that is weakness.

No. You can only live with an undefended heart once you know the difference between “This is OK for me,” and “This is not OK for me” — so you never need to worry or stress about what’s going to happen to you next, or somebody will say next, or who will harm you.

Once you know the difference between “This is OK”, and “This is not OK”, you can walk anywhere in this world safely — your guard down, your eyes filled with curiosity, your soul filled with simple wonder.

That is the alpha mare, and she’s hiding inside you somewhere, waiting to come out.

I know she is.

ONWARD,
LG

We’ve all had that flash of insight. That lightbulb-over-your-head moment when something brilliant occurs to you.

I for one, LOVE when that happens!
It seems as if it comes from out-of-the-blue, without warning, startling the shit out of me.

It makes me feel connected to something greater, and if not greater‚ then smarter. The holder of the Universal Rolodex or keys to the Library at Alexandria.

For me, it can range wildly, from an inspired idea for a birthday present for the person who has everything to a great story idea, or spontaneously remembering the name of that cheese we all lost our minds over in that little, remote town in Spain. (But only the name of the cheese—not the town—too much to ask.)

For you, it may be a new and innovative brain surgery procedure or the mathematical equation that will once and for all solve the existence of dark matter.

Big deal. I’m happy for you. Really. I am.

Who doesn’t love that flash of inspiration? You never feel more present, alive and in-the-moment.

Now here’s where it gets…complicated and this is universal.

Thunder.

God-farts.

All the ways and reasons why your brilliant idea wasn’t so brilliant after all.

Old news.

Thunder—doubt—is based on old news. Old fears. Old ways of thinking. It is rooted in the past. The things we were taught as children. Boogie-man fears. Threats against feeling secure and safe. And normal.

Thunder is  SLOOOOOOOOW. It can’t keep up. That’s why it takes a while before you can hear it.

But like a fart, it’s LOUD.  It gets your attention.

You need to forget about it. Stick with the NEW. The great idea.

New ideas, paradigms, and concepts are FAST. Like lightning. They Flash in and dare you to catch them.

They can only appear when you’re living in the moment.

Thunder is old news from the past. It rumbles and roars and smells like a million containers of leftovers in the back of the fridge or—like Shrek with gas.

You get the picture.

Carry on,
xox

Sorry, I had to, it’s in French.

As I wove around the corner, snaking slowly through the canyon on my way to the hike this morning—I spotted it.

Something wounded or dead right smack dab in the middle of the road.

Immediately my heart sank a little and my body tensed as I straightened in my seat and turned down the radio in order to get a better look. That is essential. My eyes see better in complete silence and the days of multi-tasking are over for me. I can barely drive and apply mascara anymore. I used to be a pro. Now I suck.

Besides, the music was too cheery, too hip-hoppy, for such a morbid scene.

From a distance, it appeared to be an animal. With black fur. In a pool of blood. Something larger than a cat and smaller than a dingo. Perhaps it was a skunk or a possum? They never seem to get the memo explaining how streets with cars lead to death.

It was often out of view, hidden by the cars as we wound our way, bumper to bumper, to our respective destinations.

That’s when my mind took over. This was a living creature. Cut down in its prime. Maybe it was a mother scavenging food for her babies in the dry brush of the drought-ravaged hillsides. Singles mothers can never catch a break.

It was someone’s baby. Another animal’s friend. They had frolicked and played and in all of the excitement it had forgotten to look both ways. It was then that it’s luck had run out. Splat!

There it is. I can see it again. Is it moving? Oh, dear lord, no!
Why aren’t people stopping?! Someone needs to take it for help, or drag it to the side of the road at the very least!

I’ll do it!

I was working myself into one hell of a lather.

When I get close, I’ll stop my car and block traffic in order to access the animal’s well-being. Someone must! I decided.

If you hear of the murder of a woman in yoga pants in the Hollywood Hills by a mob of angry commuters in Friday morning gridlock—it’s me.

When the poor creature came back into view it looked to be lying still. “Oh thank God it’s dead”, I muttered aloud. That is not a sentence that feels good coming out. It is something you never want to hear yourself say. But I meant it. It looked like its suffering was over.

“Why the fuck is everybody running over it?” was the next thing I heard my mouth say. But it was true. No one was swerving to miss it. In their rush to get wherever they were going, they were running directly over the poor thing. I don’t care if it’s a dead possum. Swerve a little!

It was disrespectful, to say the least.

The time had come. Ten minutes had passed and I was almost upon it.

Do I look and ruin my morning?
Or do I look away?
Do steal a quick glance and say a little prayer?
Or do I stare and gross myself out?

I looked. Right at it. And I tried to swerve to miss it but I couldn’t without dying in a head-on collision—so I did my best.

Thump, thump. I cringed.

The right side of my car ran over it at the exact moment that I saw what it was. This roadkill that had sabotaged ten minutes of my morning.

It was a pile of black socks on top of a red sweater.

I know what you’re thinking and you’re right.

Carry on,
xox

“What is with all those people who are shouting their shitty statistics at us? Stop it! Stop trying to convince me that the world is a horribly dangerous and massively disappointing and unfulfilling shit-show!”
~Me

The doctor stands there with his hands together, fingers interlaced, the corners of his mouth downturned into a solemn expression.
“I’m afraid your prognosis is grim”, he delivers the news in an equally grim monotone.

Then it starts.

“The odds are against you. Only sixteen percent of people with this thing you have live past a year. Eighty-five percent survive the chemo and radiation only to expire after ninety days.”

Blah, blah, yadda, yadda.

I know you’re just doing your job but I can assure you, nobody heard a thing after the word grim.

I know some really amazing doctors who have saved a ton of lives but why do they insist on immediately covering us with a sauce that smells like death?

Because they don’t want to give anyone FALSE HOPE.

False Hope
To look forward to something that has a strong chance of not happening and you may or may not know it.

Yeah, that would be awful. By all means don’t look forward to anything that might not happen.

Wait. Most things in life have a strong chance of going down the drain. We have no idea how they will play out. That’s why it’s called hope. We hope for the best. Otherwise, it would be called certainty, or ForSuresville.

I remember being forty-years-old and single and being told that I was more likely to die at the hands of a terrorist than to get married.

What?

A very successful and famous writer, who an entire room of us not so famous and successful writers had gathered in order to hang on her every word, ended a really sweet and uplifting day with this nugget.
“You can’t call yourself a writer unless you’ve been rejected many, many times.”
That was the “let’s get real” portion of her talk. It was supposed to be motivating but for me, it was mildly nauseating because if you know her story that was not necessarily the case for her and I think, like the gloomy-Gus guy in the white coat—she doesn’t want to prescribe any FALSE HOPE.

If you beat the odds you’re lucky. I suppose I agree. Or tenacious, delusional, persistent and optimist.

Here’s the thing, this is not a one size fits all world. If it were we would all be the same color, height, and weight. We would all look like Cindy Crawford or Bradley Cooper. Then and only then could anyone tell you EXACTLY how something was going to go down.

There are as many different possible scenarios as there are individual souls in this world. So, at last count just over seven billion.

I don’t care how many people survived six months. If you tell me that, I just may believe you because you’re a doctor—and then I’m fucked. I can’t have my own journey. I won’t make my own miracles.

I don’t care how hard it is to get a movie made in Hollywood. Four or five come out every week, so I know some bozo beat the odds.

I don’t care if ninety percent of writers fail at the premise. Ninety percent of screenplays and eighty percent of novels are rejected because of poor structure.

Dan Brown’s three novels before The Da Vinci Code all had printings of less than 10,000 copies.
Other rejection counts: Gone With the Wind, 38 times; Dune, 20 times; A Wrinkle in Time, 29 times; Lord of the Flies, 20 times; Kon Tiki, 20 times; Watership Down, 17 times; Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, 18 times; Chicken Soup for the Soul, 33 times; James Joyce’s The Dubliners, 22 times; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, more than 100 times; MASH, 21 times.

I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care!

I believe in FALSE HOPE. I love FALSE HOPE. I spread FALSE HOPE on crackers and eat it.

All of those people had hope, false or not, that they would succeed—or they would have given up. The same goes for those who survive past their expiration date. They didn’t listen to the statistics and I can guarantee you they mainlined FALSE HOPE.

I for one, think we all should all believe in FALSE HOPE. About everything. All of the time.

I shudder at the alternative.

Carry on,
xox

This seems like another lifetime ago. And it was in so many ways. I think I still had good tits.
Anyhow, this is a post that many of you haven’t read since it was so long ago you probably weren’t born yet, and it will give you a teeny glimpse into both passions I adore—writing—and riding.
Carry on,
xox

“I walk these streets, a loaded six string on my back
I play for keeps, ‘cause I might not make it back
I been everywhere, and I’m standing tall
I’ve seen a million faces an I’ve rocked them all

I’m a cowboy on a steel horse I ride
I’m wanted dead or alive
I’m a cowboy, I got the night on my side
I’m wanted dead or alive

And I ride, dead or alive
I still drive, dead or alive

Dead or alive

Dead or alive”

(From the song Dead or Alive by Bon Jovi /Songwriters Jon Bon Jovi, Richard Sambora. Published by Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC)

“Call me crazy, but it seldom, if ever, occurs to me that I could die on the back of our motorcycle.”
~Dumb Blonde Janet

Jon Bon Jovi wailed into my ears while the sexy, steel string guitar licks washed over me as I hunkered down into my husband’s back, attempting to escape the fire hose strength deluge that had just broken loose from the sky.

That song is always in heavy rotation on the endless loop of music that occupies my mind on these long rides. It’s our anthem. A clarion call from the open road.

I usually murder it, loudly sharing the harmonies with Richie Sambora. “Waaaahhhh teddddd” …but not that day.

The rain came at us in sheets, slicing sharp and gray from every direction.
Somehow, it was even finding its way UNDER my helmet, making it nearly impossible for me to see a thing. Racing down the two-lane highway in northern Montana at 60 plus miles an hour wasn’t helping.

The storm had left us no choice.
We were half way through another three hundred mile day of a 4500-mile loop.

LA to Glacier Park and back.

That day we were trying to make it through the Blackfeet Indian Reservation to St Mary’s at the base of Glacier Park. About as far north you can go and still remain inside the US.

The rain had stayed away… so far, which is why we take our longer rides in September; the weather tends to be reliable. Little did we know that this was an early start to one of the wettest, snowiest, coldest winters on record. The “Polar Vortex” winter of 2013.

I heard the weather warnings on my way back to the bathroom at the rickety little joint where we had stopped for lunch. They crackled from the ancient portable radio that wore a coat hanger as a hat as it sat on a chair in the bar. That sinister weather alert tone followed by the robotic voice that droned on and on, full of dire predictions.

Our guys got out the maps and basically informed us that we had no choice but we still took a vote—we’re democratic that way.

The vote said GO but go NOW!

The storm had used the morning to turn into a motherfucker.
Barreling across the plains, the ominous, dark, ground level clouds and distant thunder felt like a herd of stampeding black horses rolling in behind us, giving chase.

“It’s all the same, only the names have changed…”

In my imagination, as we rode the eight to twelve hours each day, WE were part of that wild herd.

A couple straddling the back of a wild stallion.

Cherokee, Apache, Navaho, Sioux, it didn’t matter. We were feral; mad with love and wanderlust, wildly riding the Great Plains bareback, looking for the next great adventure. Our deep brown skin glistening in the sun, our long black hair whipping in the hot Montana wind. That was the spirit of who we were then….and who we are now.

“I’m a cowboy on a steel horse I ride.”

The four of us were determined to outrun it. We were convinced we could.

I’m tellin’ ya, we’re badass.

Have I mentioned yet that I’m riding on the back of my husbands BMW 1200GS Adventurer, and we are accompanied by our trusty fellow riding couple, JT and Ginger? After meeting them in Spain in 2005, we have ridden the world with them.

I’ve been writing this blog since November 2012. Almost two years.
Up until this past September, it was NOT in my own voice.
I was too timid to come out of the shadows. A spiritual coward (my own label).
It was your run of the mill, generic, spiritual wisdom.
No humor. No personal stories and definitely NO F-bombs.

I know VERY few of you were readers back then. I know that because I had 23 followers, all friends, and family who were kind enough to hit follow after I sent them the I have a blog email.

Back to Montana and that freaking storm.

I wrote what happened next in Total Loss of Control (it’s in the archives).
We narrowly escaped being killed by a passing truck.

“Dead or alive”

But this post isn’t about that, it’s about what happened afterward.

Something did die that day. The part of me that wanted to remain in hiding.

When I checked in with the Muse that night to write the blog, I suggested like an idiot, that she might want to write about the harrowing experience of earlier that day.
You know, find the message in the mess. Here’s how the conversation went:

Me: Hey, you should really write about me almost dying today, that was pretty intense.

Muse: You write about it.

Me: Well, I don’t really write this stuff in my own voice. I just kind of download the wisdom and give it my best shot…but I think there could be some really good shit in that story.

Muse: It didn’t happen to me. I happened to YOU. YOU write about it.
How you felt, your thought process…

Me: Uh…yeah, here’s the thing..I don’t write.

Muse: Don’t interrupt me.

Me: Sorry.

And that’s when I started writing in my own voice, with my own personal stories and my “take” on things.
I even apologized in the first few posts.
“Oh hi, sorry, it’s just me here again”

Lame.
Timid.
Living small.
As far from courageous as you can get.
Shirking all responsibility.
Impersonal.
Total lack of vulnerability.

“I play for keeps, ‘cause I might not make it back
I been everywhere, and I’m standing tall
I’ve seen a million faces an I’ve rocked them all”

I can’t see your faces….but I know you’re there. I can feel you.
There’s so many of you now, and if I look at the analytics, you all started to read from September to today. When I started to write.

Changed my life.

Thank you. You keep me pure and true and courageous.

Much love and appreciation,
Xox

Morning you guys,
I say this ALL THE TIME. That the world is better off and safer than its ever been—and most people look at me like I’m wearing an armadillo hat—on my two heads.

But it’s TRUE! I know it is! Yet…
Why are we so invested in being scared to death? Is this a dangerous world? A bad place?

I believe not.  Are you willing to change your mind?
Take a look at this essay by Pam Grout, take a deep breath and know that there are many of us out here who are trying to drown out the 24/7 cacophony of terror.

Carry on,
xox

“Why it’s time for an intervention from the relentless 24/7 media
by ps grout

“Violence is interesting which makes it a great obstacle to world peace and more thoughtful television programming.” –P.J. O’Rourke

Crisis, conflict, and violence are the prevailing themes of our 24/7 media. If some stranger talked to us the way newscasters do, we’d tell them to go jump in a lake. Likewise, if our boyfriends made us feel the way headlines often do, our friends would line up for an intervention. ‘Toss the jerk out on his head,’ they’d say.”

Living in fear sells products, creates economies, elects politicians and keeps the flying monkeys on the job. But it’s not the truth about the world.

The reality is that the world is safer today than at any time in history. The murder rate has plummeted in the last ten years. School shootings are no more prevalent than they were in “Leave it to Beaver” days. In fact, collaboration, goodness and, yes, love are the norm.

It’s just that the dominant paradigm, the one we’ve blindly bought into is “life sucks.” Any thought to the contrary is sidelined immediately by the 27-inch box in the corner of most of our living rooms (and kitchen and bedrooms). In fact, if you pay attention to the box–and most of us use it to form our view of reality–you have little choice but to conclude that murder, rape, war, and genocide is the human condition.

But if you look at it scientifically, the math just doesn’t work out. For every Koran-burning Terry Jones, there are 335,000 ministers who aren’t burning the Koran, who are espousing peace and love and tolerance. For every Scott Peterson, there’s 58.9 million husbands who didn’t murder their wives.

Every day, we’re spoon-fed “news” about missing children, identity theft, the mild-mannered neighbor who walks into work with an AK-47 and a bomb pack and blows up his boss and 27 co-workers.

Why do we think this is news?

On the same day (February 18, 2008), two-year-old Karissa Jones was abducted from her home in Louisville, Kentucky (by her father, as it turns out), there were 53,298 two-year-olds in Kentucky who didn’t get abducted, who were safe and sound at home, happily sipping apple juice from their Winnie-the-Pooh high chairs. Nearly a million children of all ages in Kentucky also didn’t get abducted that same day.

Why is Karissa the “news?”

News, by definition, is new information that teaches people about the world. Picking out what happened to two-one thousandth of one percent of the state’s two-year-olds is not an accurate picture of the world. If you ask me, what happened to the other 53,298 two-year-olds is a bigger story. Or at least it’s more realistic news.

What you see on the newscasts at night, what you read in the morning newspaper is not a realistic perception of our world. It’s an anomaly, an out-of-character thing that happened at one moment in time. News junkies pride themselves on believing they’re well-informed. Because they know what Ann Curry said about the latest layoffs at Boeing and what Morley Safer reported on the earthquake in New Zealand, they smugly believe they’re up on current events.

But do they know about the African-American postman in Germantown, Tennessee who jumped into a lake to save a couple whose brakes went out of their car when they were coming home from a hospital dialysis treatment? Do they know about the Marysville, Kansas attorney who flew, on his own dime, to Israel to donate a kidney to a 10-year-old he’d never met?

Thinking you’re informed because you watch the news is like thinking you understand a zoo when you’ve only seen the “Z” on the entryway sign. It’s not a complete picture, guys. It’s not even a good picture. I’m not going to argue that you can’t find the letter “Z” at any zoo. But if you try to convince me you’re a zoo expert or even that you have a faint understanding of what a zoo is all about because you’ve seen a “Z,” well, I’m sorry, I have no choice but to argue.

Attention-grabbing headlines and newscasts are nothing more than a sales tool, no more “factual” than “The Simpsons.” Isolated incidences get turned into frightening trends and our own thoughts have become conditioned to leap to the worst.

The mission of this blog is to free readers from the straitjacket of the relentless news media. Instead of asking “What’s wrong?,” a question we hear over and over again, I’d like to pose a simple question with the power to change the world: “What’s right?”

Pam Grout is the author of 18 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the about to be released, Thank and Grow Rich: a 30-day Experiment in Shameless Gratitude and Unabashed Joy

“Charles finally attained inner peace by ascribing all the world’s ills to the 24/7 news cycle.”

“Wealth is not about having a lot of money; it’s about having a lot of options.”
~ Chris Rock

Being the obedient, Catholic girl and rule follower that I am, when I was advised by my accountants back in 1998 to save every dime I could scrap together, scavenge every couch cushion quarter I could find, and buy a house–I did just that.

I took my sister up on her very generous offer to move in, put everything in storage except for the scratch post/cat palace and my pillow, and called a small room with Teddy and Fraidy, my two Siamese cats, home for a year. We all went on what I referred to as ‘The Austerity Program’. The only thing tighter than our living conditions was my wallet.

Oh, don’t feel sorry for them. As I came to find out cats have little concern for square footage. Think about it. They tend to claim one or two spots in your house as their own, which they mark with coughed up fur balls and claw marks and that’s where you’ll find them hour after hour, day after day. For mine, it was the three story cat palace during the day and my pillow at night.

Anyway…Austerity became me. I excelled at it.

Living small became a mindset that I was assured would come in handy once I purchased the house and was subject to the “sticker shock”. Except for some measly living expenses and a car payment I banked every dollar. Contrary to my former way of living there were no extravagant trips, expensive new shoes or shiny new cat toys. We all hunkered down.

I had been ‘pre-approved’ to a certain dollar amount meaning that if I exceeded that imaginary line in the sand, I did so at my own peril. Of course, as I started to look around, spending my Sundays at open houses, everything in my price range was dreck. Run down with peeling paint, wonky, un-permitted additions that looked as if they had been slapped together with playing cards and duck tape, and bathrooms that were one mold spore away from being condemned by the health department.

Did I mention the amount I had to spend was HEALTHY? Like, buy me a castle with a moat AND an alligator in Ohio, healthy?

I was advised to stay away from the properties that were over what I could spend, so I immediately made a beeline for the homes north of a million dollars. These were my people. They had taste and class and lush green grass. Alas, even if I robbed a bank that would barely cover the property taxes, so most Sunday nights saw me drowning my austere little sorrows in a bottle of two-buck-Chuck, my face buried in a cat hair covered pillow to disguise the sobs. I felt sorry for myself that I only had the equivalent of a king’s ransom to spend. Oh, poor me.

Are you feeling bad? Maybe for the cats?  Please don’t.

Eventually, I did find something I liked. It had just been reduced to the very tippy top of my price limit, so I pounced, made an offer, and I’m sitting happily in that very same house writing this today.

As it turned out the peanut gallery was right; my mortgage, gardener and other responsible homeowner generated expenses kept me waist deep in austerity for a couple of years. Then so did my business. Austerity had become the gum on the bottom of my shoe. The mindset that wouldn’t let go.

Recently, I have felt the tug diminish. I’ve begun to dream of a compound in Santa Barbara.

Yep, you heard me. A compound. It may seem as unlikely as catching me gardening in a bikini, but everything starts as a dream, right? I’ve pulled up Santa Barbara real estate on Zillow the past few Sundays as a lark, and due to some residual austerity that stuck to my face—the prices caused an accidental nose-douche with ice-tea.

Fuck it! I yelled to no one in particular after almost drowning, then I clicked on an 8.9 million dollar property.
‘I have all the money in the world to spend!’, I told myself.
‘No limit, no imaginary line in the sand to keep me down! SHOW ME A COMPOUND!’

Then the funniest thing happened. And it surprised the shit out of me.
I felt a blinding white hatred for the 8.9 million dollar house. It was dark and medieval with a wine cellar that could double as a torture chamber for a serial killer. The kitchen was enormous… but it was trying was too hard! Custom this and custom that—bleeeaaaack!

I felt the same about the 12.5 million dollar monstrosity on the hill.
And the ranch with a view of the ocean.
I don’t need nine bedrooms.
I don’t want a horse property.
I don’t need a vineyard…

Come on people! Show me a decent house!

A 5 million dollar FIXER-UPPER! Yuck!
A 3.9 million dollar nightmare dipped in gold leaf. Puke!
I started to laugh. LOUD. Here, I have all the money in the world to spend…and I still can’t find something I love! I mean, at those prices—you’d better love it.

Since succumbing to the austerity mindset, I had convinced myself that the things I couldn’t afford were the things that would make me happy!
Which made me wonder. If I really had let’s say, only 2 million to spend, would I be loving these pricier properties and cursing my sad little austere lot in life, like I did before?

Uh…NO!

I actually liked the 2-3 million dollar homes better.

So, it wasn’t about the money. It was NEVER about the money. It’s a mindset.
Even with an imaginary wallet full of cash, what you want may be hard to find.
Good taste doesn’t come as a result of having a lot of money (Donald Trump).
And real wealth has nothing to do with dollars and cents.

Isn’t that good to know?

Carry on,
xox

I lost something very important to me last week. I squirmed. I obsessed. I bargained with God. The very minute I stopped caring…it came back to me.

Pass it along…
xox