As usual, at first there was nothing, then I sat down with some coffee for a few hours, and then there was something : a collection of words that might give you a good idea or teach you to do something. It wasn’t always brilliant, but I made it myself and I hoped you like it. As of today I’ve done this 250 times for this website.

When it’s done I click publish and set it free. Within a few seconds it’s in a thousand places. On a bench in Prospect Park, looking up from someone’s Android. Glowing on a white-blue iPad screen in a midwest dorm room. Waiting behind an envelope icon in some accountant’s Outlook, in Brisbane. Any stranger who finds it can beam it someone else a few minutes later, anywhere they want.

I like that this can happen. This is the future. It has never been easier to find the like-minded, to broadcast your personality, to click with a kindred mind in another city or on another continent, to find an audience for your creative thing you do. I love that I live now and not some other time.

As a consumer of creative works, it’s also easier than ever to find what you value, at least of the type that comes in the form of words, images, sounds, or anything else than can fit through a cable or shoot through the airwaves. Information is a boring word for it, but that’s what it is, and a lot of it has real value to us.

Today’s free flow of information also means it’s harder than ever to retain control of what you create. That seems like it would almost defeat the possibility of actually selling your work, given that anyone can find information on the web and have their way with it. People who create digital products today have to deal with an issue that the brick-and-mortar era never did. You can’t tie anything down, and everything you offer can be duplicated, by anyone, anywhere. You can’t lock up when you leave the shop at night. Once they’re on the internet, your wares are up for grabs.

It’s easier than ever to steal. You can lift someone else’s words, songs, pictures and tell people they are yours. Or, at least, you can neglect to tell people they aren’t yours.  Read More

My last six weeks of being 31 years old were glorious. Easy and beautiful. I had been a pessimist since I was a kid (most of that time without realizing it) and then in late August, something clicked and I no longer saw things in terms of their downsides. It was dramatic and almost effortless and I can’t fully explain how it happened. I just got used to thinking about what I want, and catching myself whenever I started thinking about what I don’t want. It worked.

It wasn’t mania or self-delusion, just a clean, consistent sense that at any moment life is good enough to smile about, and it’s only getting better. My surroundings looked the same but felt different. It was a very different mental landscape, which happened to make much more sense than the one I was used to.

My six-week cruise in a state of near-effortless optimism ran aground somewhere around last Wednesday. There were several factors. The weather changed. Indian summer became cold and nasty overnight. I was stuck in a small town again, which tends to make me a bit loopy.

But it was hubris that sunk me. Optimism felt self-sustaining, and so I kept up cruising speed, even while I eased up on my vigilance around cultivating positive expectations and weeding out negative ones. I steamed on with the smugness of the Titanic’s captain. Unsinkable! I thought. I fell asleep in a deck chair with a smile on my face and a cigar burning in my hand.  Read More

The car was skidding sideways now, for me in slow motion, and I remember having time to decide what to do. I felt the wheels beneath me leave the road’s edge, into the air above the ditch and I knew we were dead. Time stretched even wider, and I put my hands calmly over my face and waited.

There was no impact, just silence and softness and the feeling of tiny bits of glass scattering over the backs of my hands. It felt good.

***

I don’t talk about the meaning of dreams here much because it’s one of those topics that seems to attract over-reaching interpretations. Dream dictionaries rattle off one-to-one meanings as if they could possibly be the same for everyone. Dreaming about a lizard means you have anxiety about your libido, didn’t you know? Somehow it’s not supposed to matter who you are.

Not that what we dream about can’t tell us anything about what’s happening in our lives, even if we’re not conscious of it while we’re awake. They give us pretty strong clues sometimes, if a little general. We tend to dream about what we’ve been thinking about during waking life. This can include hopes and anxieties that only happen in the background normally, and which come to light when we’re asleep.

As random as they seem to be, if you look at what you tend to dream about over time you can get an idea of what might be occupying your subconscious in your day-to-day life, even over years. I’ve had thousands of dreams and certain specific themes and images have recurred consistently for long stretches of my life:

It’s the first day of school and I don’t know where my class is.

There is an exciting field trip about to happen and I miss the bus or it gets canceled.

My teeth become brittle and crumble in my mouth.

I lose my laptop and my heart’s in my throat until I find it.

I meet my dream girl and she disappears or turns into someone else.

I lose a body part violently, but rather than panic I just get kind of sad that it’s gone.

These aren’t all of them, but it’s amazing to me how consistently these themes have visited me over the last ten or fifteen years. You probably have your own, and looking at my own short list I can’t help but wonder what they have to do with me specifically. Why don’t I dream about laying comfortably on beaches or playing in the Superbowl?

It’s not that all my dreams are anxious or filled with the fear of loss. Some are euphoric, some are horrific. But the overall consistency of emotional themes seems to suggest that when my mind is left to its own, to create an experience without any external sense data defining the world for it — which seems to be the only difference between waking life and dreaming — that world is usually an anxious one.  Read More

Five or six years ago the Law of Attraction was presented to the masses in the form of a bad film. The LoA isn’t new and wasn’t new to me when I’d first heard about The Secret. Napoleon Hill was talking about how to Think and Grow Rich in the thirties, and there’s talk of the principle all the way back to before Christ.

I think when I first heard about The Secret I had recently finished Think and Grow Rich, and the afterglow had just worn off and I hadn’t really run with it. So much about the movie turned me off: the presumptuous title, the self-important wax seal motif, the whole new age vibe of it. So I never watched it, and I think its existence alone killed any urge I had to makes something out of Napoleon Hill’s take on it.

Somehow, planets had been aligning in such a way that I found myself in front of it last week. A flu/food poisoning combo had me incapacitated in front of a television, and the film was recommended to me at a time I was doped up on Neo Citron and very vulnerable.

It was really exactly like I’d expected. Terrifically cheesy. It was almost offensive. Actors, in the throes of dazzling positive intentions, shoot CGI shock waves out of their foreheads into the outside world, presumably to fetch them money, girlfriends and tropical vacations.

The action is interrupted frequently by whispered, out-of-context quotes from A-list historical figures such as Ben Franklin, Shakespeare, Emerson and Einstein, none of whom probably would have been too crazy about their posthumous involvement in this project.

But just because The Secret is profoundly cheesy and easy to dismiss, it doesn’t mean the Law of Attraction ought to be tossed out with same bathwater. I did watch it right through and by the end I was interested in the whole Law of Attraction concept again. I saw something in it I didn’t before, and in hindsight I am thankful to have watched it.

There are two basic camps on the LoA issue:

1) Those who believe that the universe (“the outside world”) is bound to do its own thing, as determined by its own internal laws, regardless of what you think about it or intend for it to do.

2) Those who believe that the course of the universe, or at least what any one person experiences of it, is altered by one’s perceptions, by their thoughts about it and their intentions for it.

By default I think most of us fall into the first camp. The world seems pretty stable in the way it works. I had been hoping for riches, fame and uncanny luck my whole life, and whether I got them (I didn’t) seemed to depend on what I did and not what was in my head.

There were too many contradictions for it to make sense. What if two of us were “intending” to win the same one-on-one ping pong match? It didn’t make sense. I used to feel these questions trapped me in camp 1. I couldn’t believe in a subjective universe if I wanted to. I knew better!  Read More