Category Archives: Perception

Give Me Victory, and Give Me Sex!

The other day I was watching this football game on TV. They were kicking the ball around, running up and down the field. I’ve heard that football players, or soccer players a they’re called in some parts of the world, are the best-conditioned athletes there are. I had an acquaintance once that I worked with that was a semi-pro soccer player. He asked me casually to participate in an upcoming marathon with him. Being a dumb high school kid at the time, I readily agreed. I thought it would be fun. He, being the semi-pro soccer player, was in fairly good shape, so running a marathon wasn’t a problem for him. Me, on the other hand, despite being a dumb high school kid, wasn’t quite as prepared, as I should have been.

Personally, I like the story behind the marathon. Some Greek guy ran 40 kilometers after the Greeks, led by the Athenians, defeated the Persians at the battle of Marathon around 500 BC. He ran from the city of Marathon to Athens to tell the Athenians that they were victorious. This wasn’t just a celebratory run. Had the Greeks lost at Marathon, the Persians would have marched straight to Athens and sacked the city, burned the temples, killed the men and raped the women. That was what happened back in those days. So the Greek guy who ran the 40K to tell the city was doing them a great favor. He was telling them they weren’t going to be killed and raped and then all their property destroyed. It would be a terrible thing to be sitting around hoping that a foreign army is going to come marching on your city in a couple days to make your last moments of life a new experience in suffering and pain.

The story goes that when this Greek guy reached Athens, he said the word “Victory!” and then fell dead. And of course, “Victory” in Greek is “Nike”, which is where the brand name comes from. Maybe if the poor guy had been wearing a pair of shoes, he wouldn’t have fallen dead. But I’m not so sure if that was the whole story, or the motivation for this Greek guy was merely to let the poor Athenians they were saved. You’ve heard the old saying, “Don’t shoot the messenger,” right? Well that saying is around because they actually did used to shoot the messenger. If somebody arrived with bad news, they generally were so angry that they killed the guy. I’m sure you seen or heard about the famous scene where the guy shouts “This is Sparta!” and then proceeds to kill the messenger and all his co-messengers by kicking them down that long well.

When the messenger arrived with good news, they did the opposite. He was treated like a rock star. Food, women, anything he wanted for a couple of days. This wasn’t really an official procedure of the city; this is just the way it worked out. Some guy would return from a big battle, and let the city know their men had succeeded, which meant that the other cities army wasn’t going to come and destroy everybody. Naturally, everybody was ecstatically happy, and the center of all this happiness was the lucky messenger. So of course, he got invited to parties, and orgies and whatever other celebratory customs were around.

So I don’t know if that Greek guy, who gave birth to both a very traditional Olympic sport and a world famous brand of athletic wear, had anything on his mind other than all the insane partying he was going to do for the next two or three days. Of course that version is not the most romantic version, but a funny things happen to stories over time. They get repeated and changed and take on whatever the current belief system that rests in the cultural consciousness. Because current western culture is still very steeped in traditional religious beliefs and sexual taboos, that part of the story is kind of only snickered at or not taken very seriously. Because, like it or not, a large part of the western culture is firmly rooted in the Church, namely because the Church was the major governing power until only recently. Stories from other cultures are either rejected, or filtered through the societies collective consciousness to mold to whatever messages we’d like to read into a story of historical event.

True power and choice comes when you can choose your own set of beliefs and filters through which you can see the world. If you can take a true objective view of the current values and priorities of the society you live, and only choose to take on those beliefs and values that serve you and the choices you’ve made for what you want your life to become, then you’re a step ahead of most other people. The sad fact about living in modern society is that most people are content to let others do their thinking for them, and dictate to them what is important and what isn’t. When you can truly learn to think for yourself, and decide your own direction in life, you will as victorious as the Greeks were at Marathon.

My friend finished the Marathon in around three and a half hours. I finished in barely under five. It took a huge amount of focus to keep going and not throw in the towel. I realized at about mile ten that I was in way over my head, so I had a tough choice to make, and both choices would have it’s own set of consequences. The next 16 miles proved to be a horrible. One of the things that greatly helped me to finish was all the people standing along the course cheering the runners on. It is one experience that I will never, ever forget.

Design Your Own Trance For Love and Romance

I was talking to a friend of mine the other who had a rather interesting experience recently. He was telling about this stage hypnosis seminar that he went to. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a life stage hypnotist, but they can be pretty funny. People can do some funny things when under some kind of hypnotic trance. There was one guy who, every time the hypnotists said his name, he would automatically look out over the audience and see everybody without any clothes on. The audience got a kick out of that. There were other things like counting to ten and forgetting all the odd numbers, thinking their feet were glued to the floor, and thinking that they were professional singers. One of the most interesting things was at the end, when all the people that volunteered were given their post hypnotic suggestion as a thank you for volunteering. The hypnotist said:

From now on, every night you will have a full, restful sleep. You will fall asleep quickly and easily, and wake up refreshed and feeling positive and happy. You will always have wonderful dreams that will satisfy your every fantasy, even those you are too shy to share with your closest friend.

Because everybody saw how readily they took all the other suggestions, like clucking like a chicken and having joints made out of wood, everybody assumed, correctly, that they would take the above suggestion as well. And I imagine that suddenly everybody was thinking the same thing that I was at that time:

“Dang, I wish I would have volunteered!”

Of course, had the hypnotist told everybody what a wonderful post hypnotic suggestion he was going to give, and what a wonderful experience it was going to be, then everybody would have volunteered. Instead of relaxing and watching the show, people would have been wishing it were them up there. Because the hypnotist obviously knew what he was doing, he created the allusion that volunteering was scary and dangerous. So when people were watching the show, they could all think, “I’m sure glad that’s not me!” Of course this turned into, “I wish that were me!” at the end.

Of course, that’s how risk usually works. If you knew you were going to be successful going into something, it wouldn’t be risky, and everybody would be doing it. What separates the winners from the not so much winners, (or however you want to categorize ourselves) is that people that take measured risks, generally have a better life. Sure, sometimes they get embarrassed, or lose a few dollars, or look foolish in front of others, but they always seem to bounce back and learn from the experience. And the times that they do succeed, the rewards are enormous. It seems that people that make a habit of taking measured risks only need one or two successful outcomes to keep their belief in themselves up.

I was playing golf with a guy once who didn’t keep score. I asked him why not, and he said that if he kept score it would only frustrate him. I asked him what he looks forward to, if it wasn’t a good score, and he said the pleasure of hitting a good shot. He said the combination of the physical feeling of a nice swing, combined with the visual result of the ball landing on the green was a wonderful experience, and that he didn’t need to write down a number to record it. The experience was enough. I was surprised when he said he only made one or two shots like that during one round of golf, which judging by his skill level, was easily over a hundred shots per round. I asked him if all the other not-so-great shots frustrated him, and he said that going into each shot, he only focused on a potential good outcome. If he didn’t get one, he would immediately start thinking about the next shot, and forget the ball his just hit over the fence or into the water. I thought that was a pretty good strategy. He seemed to enjoy playing golf more than most people I’ve played with.

My friend said that one of the most interesting things about the seminar is that it is held in Bangkok, Thailand. The instructor always has this particular course (once a year or so) in an exotic location. The reason for this, my friend explained, was that even if you are not up on stage forgetting all the numbers between one and ten, most people are walking around in a hypnotic trance of some sort. If you are ever focusing on something to the exclusion of other things around you, you are in trance. It is unavoidable. The secret is to make sure your trances are positive and life affirming, like the golfer who only focused on positive outcomes. If you walk around thinking about your ball going in the lake, or that girl rejecting your advances, or that business venture you are thinking of failing, you won’t be very happy. On the other hand, if you focus on a good green landing, or a smile and a phone number, or a successful business, and keep these thoughts in your head despite what happens, you’ll do pretty good.

Pay Attention to the Wisdom of Your Mind

As you are sitting there now, reading these words, feeling those feelings in that chair, you can begin to notice the sounds around you. And as you expand your awareness to the sounds around you, you might begin to notice certain sensations that you hadn’t noticed before. The feeling in your left leg, the feeling behind your right ear, the sensations on the bottom of your feet. And as you feel those sensations, and hear those sounds around you, you may begin to remember memories of things that happened before. Memories that you hadn’t remembered to think about until now. Happy memories, pleasant memories. You might begin to recall ideas you had from before that you hadn’t begun to follow through on yet. Ideas like this one, or that one, that seemed like a wonderful thing, a wonderful idea of something that you could do or say or express, and then somehow something else happened, and that wonderful idea went to the back of your mind, where it’s been waiting ever since, for you to come here and remember it.

One of the good things about memories is that the really good ones have a tendency to come out more often than others. Some of these disguise themselves as “bad” memories that you don’t want to think about. Like one day you’ll be doing something that you normally do every day, and one of “those” thoughts will pop into your head and you’ll realize after you’ve thought this thought for a few moments that it isn’t a particularly happy thought, and you wonder why it keeps running around and around in your head if you don’t like thinking it.

The reason I use the word ‘disguise’ is because they are actually trying to help you in some way. Sometimes a thought will origin with the intention of pointing out something to you, and it will grab whatever metaphorical memories that it thinks will help you out the most. Often times these metaphorical memories are rather mysterious, and instead of looking for the underlying message, we tend to try and force the ‘bad’ thought out of our minds.

I had a friend once that was a really spiritual person. She was always wearing different colored crystals and practicing different forms of meditation. I went to a lecture once with her of this guy that was some mystical guru from India. It was at this new age center downtown in the city I was living at the time. There were several very interesting people there, and they were all from different disciplines and areas of expertise. It was interesting because the guru from India gave his message using lots of metaphorical terms that could be use to apply to many different situations. After the lecture, we went out with a couple of her friends to a Pakistani restaurant nearby. It’s interesting when you find things are close by that you didn’t know before. Kind of like finding related things when you didn’t have any idea these things have anything to do with each other.

So while we were eating, one of her friends started telling me about his spiritual guide. Now as soon as he started talking about a spiritual guide, I was reminded of an interesting religious ceremony I witnessed once while in Taiwan. I was at friends house, which happened to be next door to a temple. My friend’s uncle owned the temple, and my friend and her family lived in the house. One of her older relatives (I think) stood in front of the alter at the temple, and then started mumbling a bunch of really incoherent speech, at least it was incoherent to me. My friend calmly explained that he was channeling entities from some other Buddhist plain of existence. I wasn’t sure what to think about this so I just kind of watched with interest. He went on like this for about ten minutes, until he finished and left.

So this guy says that when he communities with his spiritual guide, his guide sometimes gives him direct suggestions, and ideas. Other times his guide speaks only in pictures that sometimes takes him several days to understand. He says that everybody has a spiritual guide, even if they don’t know it. He said that most people’s spirit guides try and communicate to the person based on the person’s own belief system and upbringing. This where the Catholic Church got the idea of Guardian Angels (which is an official belief in the Catholic Catechism).
He went on to say that the secret in correctly interpreting your spirit’s communication is to be open, and to trust your mind to come up with the right answer.

Which it’s good to always pay attention to your stray thoughts, because you never can be sure where they are coming from.

Choose Your Own Criteria

There is a new bookstore in my town I’m just dying to go to this weekend when I get a chance. It’s on the other side of town, so I’m going to have to make a day of it. It is four stories, and has an Internet café on the fourth floor. Internet café’s in Japan are really cool. Not only do you get the Internet, but also you get free drinks (non alcoholic), a nice comfortable leather chair, and a semi private space to do whatever you please. They even have huge racks of comic books that you can read if that is your thing. But one of the reason’s I’m particularly interested in this book store is they built it next door to a coffee shop, and I heard they knocked down the wall between the coffee shop and the bookstore, so customers can kind of go to two shops in one. It’s great when you find that some things just go together.

Like some people are just a perfect match for each other. I’m you know several couples that you just couldn’t picture except with each other, like they’ve known each other for many many lifetimes. And the funny thing is, is that they are both similar in many ways and different in many ways. Like God somehow picked them specifically to be with each other. Some people fit together like a simple jigsaw puzzle, but an old one that is kind of bent and faded. It’s easy to get the pieces to match, but they fall apart quickly, and it doesn’t take long to hook them up. Others are like those really complicated brain puzzles you find where it takes almost forever to see how they fit, but when they finally fit together, it suddenly becomes obvious. And they don’t want to separate, because they don’t want to go through the hassle of being put back together again.

Other puzzles are the trick ones that magicians use in their magic acts. They look like there is no way they could fit together, but with a magic flick of his wand, they suddenly become inseparable. These of course, are only built to look like they are connected, and even though everybody knows on some level that they aren’t really connected; they kind of play along and make believe they are connected. Nobody wants to be the guy that stands up and reveals how the trick is done. That can ruin it for everybody.

Then there are those once in a while situations that you come across. Like when you see a cat and a dog hanging out together. Maybe their owner had them since they were a puppy and a kitten, or maybe the dog is suffering some midlife crisis and he thinks he is a cat, but there they are. Natures sworn enemies have somehow decided that it doesn’t matter if they are supposed to be enemies, if they want to hang out together, they are going to hang out together. They don’t care what anybody says. They have found the secret of being able to create your own happiness without being dependent on the opinions of others. Who knows, maybe many animals, dogs and cats, lions and zebras, cobras and mongooses try and be friends with each other, only to find out how powerful peer pressure is, and fall back into the roles that their respective societies have chosen for them, and give up on being able to think for yourself, so you can define your own criteria for happiness.

Which is why I am looking forward to going to that bookstore. It is not a mainstream bookstore, and it is kind of on a small side street, so it won’t likely be very crowded. One thing I like to avoid is large crowds. There is nothing better than discovering some really cool like this, and sharing it with your friends.

Let Your Curiosity Lead the Way

I met a woman and her husband yesterday as I was hanging out in my favorite mall coffee shop. They were very friendly, and we had a lot in common, so we chatted for quite a while. He was telling me that they were getting ready to be relocated to the other side of the country. It was a promotion, so he was getting more money, and better benefits. But nevertheless, they were both nervous. They had both lived in this relatively small town their whole lives, and were going to be moving to a big city. You know how it is, right? You feel comfortable, like you’ve gotten the hang of everything, then suddenly it gets all turned upside down. You don’t know if you will be ok, or get what you need. You don’t even know where to start because everything is so new. On the one hand, you are glad to have this opportunity, but on the other hand, you are nervous, because you don’t know how this will turn out, and you don’t even know how to proceed.

They were telling me how their daughter was just learning to walk. She just turned two. She is at the age where you just become really curious about everything. You see something new, and you want to discover what this is. The only requirements are that you haven’t seen this before. You spend your whole existence, exploring, and walking around. Touching things, smelling things, tasting things. Many neuroscientists think this is the greatest resource of humanity, the power of curiosity. To seek new things. To search and discover simply for the sake of searching and discovering. You will never know when you will find this useful and interesting.

It’s like sometimes as adults, we can just let go of any expectation, and just let our curiosity lead us. We are old enough to stay away from danger, and to know this is a resource when we see something we like. Many of the great discoveries that we still use today came from when people were just able to let go of expectations and ask “What if?” Life can seem dreary and repetitive when we forget to do this on a regular basis. Let your curiosity lead the way.

They were telling me their happiest times (so far!) of being parents was to watch their kid find something she thought was exciting, and just feel good for discovering this. Like you can really feel a sense of accomplishment when your curiosity has led you to something cool like this. She was telling me that she likes to follow her kid around in bookstores, just like the one we were sitting in, and watch her daughter go through the joys of being able to learn something new.

Which is why he was telling me that although they were a bit nervous about leaving their comfortable small town, with the same people and the same shops and the same restaurants, they were really excited about moving to the huge metropolis where they were going. He said that he jumped on the opportunity when it presented itself. I’m sure they will do fantastic in their new life.

Remember What the Fortune Teller Said

I was walking down this shopping arcade the other day. It was on of those streets that have a covered roof, and they don’t allow cars on the street. There are even signs up that say you have to walk you bike, but many people ignore this rule. Which is fine with me, because I’ve never seen anybody crash into anybody else. I suppose it would be a problem if they were riding fast and weren’t looking out where they were going, but so far, so good. They have many shops on this street; the most popular are clothing shops. Probably a fair distribution of men’s and women’s clothes, from professional to trendy. A few coffee shops, a couple of ice cream shops, and several eye glasses shops. Your typical downtown, modern shopping arcade.

I saw one shop the other that I hadn’t noticed before, and I had to take a look inside. You know how when you see something, you immediately become interested, and you tell yourself that you have to look inside this to find what’s inside. And the more you look, the more you want to find out more. Which is exactly why I thought that very same thing.

So I looked inside, and there were several hundred different stones and crystals. Some were made specifically for jewelry, or accessories. How they take something and craft it to be ornamental and put on display. And then there were other stones, which were still in their raw form. Many different crystals. Stones that were more for their symbolic use rather than their ornamental use. Perhaps even metaphysical, as they had several charts on the Chakras and which stones went with which Chakra. (Lately, my favorite Chakra during meditation has been the Sacral Chakra.)

This reminds me of a psychic I met at a party several months ago. She said she was only an amateur, hobbyist kind of psychic, as she didn’t do it for a living. More for party tricks. She had a deck of Tarot Cards, and I asked her to give me a reading. She dealt all the cards out, and gave me an interesting reading. While I don’t remember the specific cards she dealt, I remember what she said about them, because it was absolutely true:

You have had some trouble in the past, and you are afraid that as you move into the future, these same things will trouble you. But you don’t realize is that some of these troubles form your past can actually turn into benefits if you take them as the experience that they were meant to be. And when you think of your future, you are looking forward to some things, but others you’d rather not think about, and perhaps even wish that some things that are coming in your future would just disappear, while other things that you would really like to happen, you are afraid that they won’t.

I asked her how she knew that from the cards that were dealt, as the cards were fairly ambiguous. She again shocked me with her insight:

Meaning is illusory. What you meaning you give is really a reflection of what is inside you. As you change within, so you will change without. The meanings you give will change over time, just as you will change over time. What you think is fearful today, may be funny tomorrow. And what you think is funny today, may be fearful tomorrow. Never trust the meaning you give, only trust your experience.

I was pretty amazed that such a “hobbyist” psychic would have such insight, but there it was. She said her real job was a very popular hairdresser at a local salon. She’d worked at one of those places where all the hair technicians are independent contractors, and they have to pay to use the shop. She had been there for several years, and was always in demand.

I ended up buying two crystals at that shop, one for my third Chakra, and one for my fifth Chakra. In hope that they would bring me what I was after. Sometimes I carry them with me, so I can remember what the fortuneteller said.

How to Slay the Demons of Your Fears

I was having breakfast with a friend this morning. She wanted to try out this new restaurant that opened up nearby. It’s interesting how difficult it can be to open and maintain a restaurant. They can be incredibly rewarding, if you open up in the right location, and have the kind of food and environment that people like. There are a lot of variables that go into it. I remember reading a survey a while back, asking people what was the most important thing about a dining experience. I think the quality of the actual food came in third or fourth behind ambiance, and the general feeling of the place. Even McDonalds’ mission statement stresses “experience” over anything else. Experience can be a tricky thing to define. It can be really subjective, many people experiencing the same thing as different. Some people might not really enjoy something, but others can really like this. It’s like when you see this, you can really think to yourself how much you can enjoy this.

My friend was telling me about how she came up with an interesting way to help her toddler overcome nightmares. He is three, and is starting to have scary dreams. She was telling me how her physician told her that some children have more bad dreams than good dreams, so it’s important to develop good strategies to help overcome  fears. She had read a few books on child development, and being an ex kindergarten teacher, she was pretty well equipped to handle these kinds of things, so of course I was interested in what she did.

She said that whenever her son would wake up from a nightmare, she would ask him to describe it. She noticed that the more he described his dreams, the scarier they got. The monsters became meaner, with bigger teeth and hungrier looks in their eyes. Sometimes he would even imagine that they had blood dripping from them. So my friend decided to try something. She gently helped her child change some of the things that he’d experienced in the dream, without really changing the actual content. She changed the meaning behind the content.

For example, instead of having teeth that were dripping blood, the monster suddenly had teeth that were dripping chocolate sauce. Instead of having hungry looks in his eyes, the monsters eyes were red from laughing at a funny cartoon. And instead of having a mean look on his face, it became a look of consternation as he was trying to quietly fart without drawing attention to himself.

I asked her if this worked, and she said that it didn’t take long for her kid to begin to do this on his own. He would wake up, and as he started to recall his dream, he could change the pictures around so it wouldn’t be as scary. She said the trick was to take whatever pictures you come up with, and play with changing around certain aspects of them. You can use it for things other that scary dreams. You can use it on memories, or imaginations of the future, as well.

For example, if you have a particular memory you’d like to change, you can still remember the actual memory the same way, but change the meaning of the content. Like if you remember somebody yelling at you, you might have remembered that it was because you did something wrong, which would in turn cause you to feel not so good. But if you remember them as yelling at you because they were in a bad mood because they themselves got yelled at, it’s not so bad.

She went on to say that you could also play around with changing the actual content. For example, you can take a memory of a teacher yelling at you in front of the class in third grade, and shrink the teacher down in your mind to where she is only three inches tall, and her voice sounds like Mickey Mouse would if he had inhaled some helium. Then when you remember the class laughing in the background, you can remember them as laughing at her, and not you.

I thought that that little three year old is pretty lucky to have a mom that would become so interested in making sure that you can do these things to make your fears go away. I’ll be interested in seeing how much he can turn into a more resourceful person with so many skills to help others.

What Lies Beneath Word Power

This morning I was out for my daily walk. I usually try to leave my apartment before six thirty. It’s a great time to walk. The sun is still low enough so you get that “sunrise” feeling. The air is calm and still. Whatever weather has been going on during the night is in transition to whatever the weather will be like for the day. It’s like a shift change in the weather factory. The people that make the nighttime weather have clocked out, and the daytime weather people are just getting started. Kind of like they are looking over the report from the night crew to see what they are supposed to be doing. Sometimes they night crew has to work overtime, and daybreak doesn’t have much effect on the weather.

But this morning, it did. Last night was terribly windy, and was making a huge racket. Swirling sounds making all kinds of weird noises that don’t normally occur. This morning was quite different. Still. Calm. The clouds that had rained a little bit last night were still up there, big and dark and threatening, but they had a kind of strange peace to them. When I walked through the rice fields I couldn’t help but notice the largeness of the sky. The mountains off in the distance. The flat fields that the farmers have been getting ready for the spring rice planting. Beautiful.

Then I passed by the stream where the carp live. There is an elementary school nearby, and the children love to feed the fish. And because carp can pretty much eat anything, they grow pretty big. The carp are conditioned to swim to the bank of the stream whenever they see a person stop. Even though it is just a simple condition/response mechanisms, as fish aren’t know for their high intellect, but it’s cool nonetheless. You could almost imagine their fish conversations interrupted by the presence of a human, as they break out of their normal fish cliques and congregate on the bank, hoping for some food. Of course I didn’t have any. Even though I know, deep in my psyche, that they are just fish, and cannot think, cannot plan, cannot communicate, I felt the need to at apologize for not having any food for them. (Of course I looked around to make sure nobody saw me talking to the fish.)

I’ve seen other people doing that as well. Talking to animals, as if the animal could understand, and respond. Many people who keep pets that have become part of the family will tell you that they do indeed understand them. And I’m sure they do. When I was kid, my brother had a red lab. He could understand several words, and what they meant. There was (is?) that gorilla, Koko, who could (can?) supposedly use sign language to express complex “human” emotions.

Where is the difference between simple training, and pure communication? Under what circumstances would a human be able to communicate with an animal that he/she has never met before? Is human/animal communication purely a stimulus/response mechanism, and the animal really doesn’t know what is going on?

I was reading an article about human communication. Only seven percent of our face-to-face communication is based on the words we use. The rest is based on voice tone, body language, facial expressions and about a million other things that they probably don’t even know how to measure yet.

I don’t disagree that words are incredibly important. Without words we wouldn’t have much of a civilization. The use of words and language is likely what powered human evolution to become as cerebral as we are. So we can write blogs and read novels and create beautiful music instead of sitting around eating bananas all day. But words aren’t the only thing. Not by a long shot. There is much more going on in our communication that just words. You’ll be amazed what you will learn when you really pay attention to things. It kind of gives “reading between the lines” a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?

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There is Magic Inside

I was walking down the street yesterday, minding my own business, like I normally do. Well, almost normally. Most of the time at least. And I passed by this very small flower shop. It was a flower shop that I had passed by several times before. I don’t know what it was that caused me to go inside. I certainly didn’t want to buy any flowers, as I wasn’t going anywhere that warranted a gift of flowers to anyone.

The first thing that struck me was just how large the flower shop seemed on the inside. From the outside, it looked like a small shop that could only hold maybe a few dozen arrangements. The front of the store was not that large, and on either side were rather looking storefronts, so you would never imagine what you could find inside until you really look. The first thing I was reminded of is the scene in Harry Potter (book four or five, I can’t remember) when he went to watch the world Quiddich Cup, and he went inside a tent set up by the Weasley’s. It was small on the outside, but enormous and filled with magic on the inside. That’s what this flower shop was like.

Inside were incredible arrangements of flowers I’d never even seen before. The colors were tantalizingly fantastic, and the way the proprietor had arranged them was absolutely breathtaking. I won’t even begin to try and describe it, because one, I only know the vocabulary of about six colors, and two, I only know the names of maybe three flowers. Bu suffice it to say that as soon as I went inside that shop, I started racking my brains for a reason to buy an arrangement or two and a reason to give them to somebody.

I started talking to the proprietor of the place. She had been in business for about ten years, all in the same shop. She had done several renovations to maximize the small space she had to work with, and the results spoke for themselves. She had originally been a high level executive assistant, pulling close to six figures a year (and that was over ten years ago,) but something about her job was less than satisfying. She wasn’t able to find happiness answering the needs of others. She was well respected, well liked, had enjoyed several promotions over the course of her career, but something was missing. She wasn’t able to choose her own direction.

So she looked around and found the flower shop for sale. She had always had a penchant for arranging things. But up until then, she had always been arranging things according to the criteria of other people. Like when you’ve had enough, and you need to choose things that are important to you. You feel a need to set your own course, and not have to follow the orders of others. You need to be yourself, whatever that may be. And she found it in this shop.

She said that at first the money was less than a quarter than she made before, but really enjoyed it. She could find ways to express her creativity in a way that gave her that special kind of satisfaction that you get when you do things your own way.

And of course, as time went on, and her shop became more and more successful, she started to earn more money than she did before. And not only that, but she is now able to set her own hours, choose her own arrangements, and feel really proud of her work.  Something she suspects never would have been possible before.

It’s kind of nice knowing that there are still people like this to model yourself after.

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Find Treasure Here

I went over to a friend’s house recently. I had promised I would help him clean out his garage. I don’t remember the conditions of the promise, as helping somebody to clean out their garage is not something that you throw around. I would definitely place cleaning out somebody’s garage on the same level as moving, perhaps even in a category all on it’s on. At least moving, you don’t really need to get very dirty, and you usually get beer and pizza afterwards. And if you are lucky, your friends hired a moving company, so you only really need to help with the small stuff. But in helping somebody clean out their garage, there is no telling how much filth and grime you’ll have to wade through.

Because he did successfully persuade me that I did indeed promise him to help clean out his garage, I really didn’t have a choice. He said that he would share the profits from his upcoming garage sale, but I had my doubts. I had known this guy for a while; he’s not the kind of guy that can discover treasure lurking in his garage. I guess that is a matter of opinion, however way you slice it. It’s interesting when you make a choice based on what somebody persuades you to do. It’s almost as if whether or not I actually made the promise isn’t the issue, but rather how well he was able to persuade which was the deciding factor. But I digress.

So there we were, cleaning out his garage. As I suspected, we didn’t find much of value. So much so that we decided not to have a garage sale at all (there go my profits) and haul everything to the junkyard. At least it didn’t take as long, because once we decided that everything was going straight to the junkyard, we didn’t waste any time deciding which we could sell, or which we should throw in the trash heap. It’s amazing what happens when you remove indecision from your decision making process.

We threw everything in the junk heap, except for one item, which he refused to part with. It was an old electronics kit that he had bought many years ago from a local camera shop. It was a kind of a do-it-yourself kit that was apparently designed to foster the imagination of a budding tech wizard. He seemed to be confused when he found it, as it was hard to remember this. Then as he was able to slowly realize what this is, he found himself being able to remember fond memories. He started telling me stories about the fun he’d had with a kid. Taking things apart and putting them back together again. It was like he was able to experience the joy of discovery all over again. Seeing how happy he was when he found his hidden treasure, I couldn’t help but remember the toys I had when I was a kid. You know how when you have this memory, and you don’t really think about it, and something just sets it off? Something completely random that you don’t expect, and you suddenly find yourself remembering all those wonderful experiences that you’d had before? I think it’s pretty cool when stuff like that happens.

But he did end springing for the pizza and the beer after we cleaned out his garage. Luckily we didn’t have to do a lot of sweeping or anything. And because he has one of those garages that you never park your car in, there wasn’t a lot of grime and stuff. So when we finally made it to the pizza place, we weren’t completely filthy.

Can you think of any treasures that you have stored away that you’d forgotten until now?

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