Everything I've ever wanted

Today, a friend messaged me that she had the thought, the realization, that she has everything she’s ever wanted. It’s maybe not been in the moment she thought it would be, or the manner she expected. Still, she’s gotten it, and she still has it. Everything she’s ever wanted.

It’s a thought I’ve had before, and one I was meant to hear again, right then. A reoriented perspective on what is here right now, and a reminder. Reminders to release the timeline, release the constraints, and let be as big and beautiful as it is. Everything I’ve ever wanted. That, and more.

She ended it, too, with “How lucky am I,” and I loved reading it as a statement. How lucky is she, and how lucky am I, and how important that we see that—that we are lucky, and also that we choose to see—that we have everything we’ve ever wanted.

Ask for what you want

I’ve been thinking about how it’s really such a gift to know what you want. For one to know what one wants, and in any moment, really. Because it doesn’t always come through clear, and sometimes it’s actually what other people want, or what we think other people want, or what we’re expected to want so we’ve accepted we want.

To know what we want takes introspection, reflection and connection to ourselves. And it also takes recognition and acknowledgment that it may come in an unexpected form. Like, knowing what we don’t want, or something we don’t want; that’s also knowing what want. Or, not knowing what we want about something big (something we really feel like we want to know what we want about) may take us on a path realizing many little wants that leads back eventually to knowing the big want, even if they seem unconnected. Like what we want for breakfast.

The best way to honor that gift of knowing what we want, I think, is to ask for it. Ask for it in its true form, too; not some version we think is going to be more palatable, or easier, or more “attainable.” Because we don’t actually know that the more (“)convenient(“) compromise we’re proposing is actually convenient or even desirable anyone at all, because we don’t really know what other people. And it’s definitely not for us, because it’s not what we actually want.

Asking for what we want takes courage, and that comes from the heart. The heart chakra, too, is conveniently connected to the throat chakra. A direct line to asking for what you want.

Posted on 8/8, the Lion’s Gate of 2022

What if it all works out?

It took me going to a psychic in 2018 when I was living in NYC to begin to believe, to be able to let myself believe, that everything could be, would be, OK. Great, even. Maybe. Maybe? I wasn’t ready believe that big and openly yet, but then, there, in a small storefront tucked off Bleecker Street and on display for all the Saturday NYU-ish pedestrian traffic, gripping my friend’s hand, the curtain had started to part.

It took me needing someone in a storefront on Sullivan Street with a tarot deck to reflect things back to me like I would be “successful” professionally. Even though, by all traditional markers, I had been up to that point, and also was then. To tell me that “money would never be a problem,” even though—and I feel fortunate—it never has been. (Sadly, this has a broader, gendered context; it’s consistently reported that financial insecurity is higher for women than men, across demographics and time. I think we inherit some generational fear, too; women weren’t even allowed to manage their own finances and open bank accounts in the U.S. until 1974.) She predicted one big thing that came true within 24 hours, too, and was really so special, which is maybe something I’ll write about another time. I know it’s because I was open after that; I know it’s because I was light, lighter after that. Still, it also was that. It’s all always connected.

I told a friend at work about my experience that Monday, and we had a long, animated talk about it. He shared in the excitement of it, and shared what someone had once said to him, that had felt so profound to him then. It did to me, too. What if it all works out? Like, what if it does?

I think of that often, and I thought about recently when one corner of TikTok started talking about the Tinkerbell Effect recently. As packaged in the “manifestation” context, is essentially the idea that believing in something enough will make it happen. The recommended wordplay setup is apparently to frame it as a “What if” to bypass doubt otherwise triggered in the brain, and instead get us thinking of it in more of a concrete way. Laying imaginary bricks it into existence.

I think of so many what if’s in a day. It’s a mode of survival we have; it’s preparation for protection. What if I’m wrong? What if everything disappears? What if this car veers suddenly? And we end spending so brain time in imagined crisis; imagined crisis that can register as real.

Are we as prepared for "good” things to happen to us? Big things? Bountiful, beautiful things, in whatever way that means to us? Will we even see them or be able to receive them? We may feel like we need them, but have we played in the thought space of what it would actually be like?

What if everything works out? What if it’s all already worked out?

What if we have everything we need? What if it’s all already here?

For my friend Chuck and his ducks, because, what if it all works out?