The Secret

After a few tries I finally had a break through with a no-knead dough recipe.  The crumb was not sticky, it rose well and the crust was ideal.  Though there were still no mega fissures that make me think I cracked the code (yes, multilevel pun intended).  I’m going to have to will cracks into the next Boule or at least make some cuts to invite them.  It is the law of attraction, right?  I want a good cracked crust so I shall envision it and it will happen.  Or is it that statistics on the surface tension of baking bread correlated to escaping moisture will probably rule in my favor before long.  My trick was just actually kneading the thing for thirty seconds because somewhere deep inside of me I associate dough with kneading.

Let’s, however, revisit this Law of Attraction thing.  So maybe I am a little late for the bandwagon, though it is thousands of years in the rumbling, but I never really caught on to this secret phenom-hype.  A proper origin in the eyes of modern media seems to be back with the Babylonians, then through every great mind in the last few thousand years before it came back around the turn of the century with Haanel’s The Master Key System.  More currently we have seen the movement that started with What the ^&! Do We Know and, then, The Secret.

This faith system, based on wanting, believing and receiving seems to ride the fence between sacred and silly.  There are few people who would want to believe this more than myself.  That there is a methodology, a practice if you will, about believing so hard in what you want that it eventually, and coincidentally, arrives at your feet.  Whether by mail or by you walking there I do not know.  I do not know because I have not progressed beyond the trailer.  Every alternative media source, including Youtube, seems to have an issue with their version of The Secret.  The strange thing, and I shit you not, is that all the videos lock up after two seconds on the timer.  This happened with almost a dozen efforts at different sources.  Who and/or what does not want me to discover the secret?

It seems that I might have to will the dollars out of my pocket to find out more.  In Borders today I sat down and read a handful of pages and felt that the small, only sold in hardcover according to the sales clerk, book had a repetitive message about asking (politely I would imagine), believing and then receiving.  Does this mean that if I want to go to Cuba with some friends that I can will my ticket and the non-stamping of my visa?  Or does it mean using my AmEx and greasing a couple palms along the way?

Blog after blog had skeptics or hand-over-fist believers.  Anything that carries two extreme sides is definitely worth looking at…I mean take our current bipartisan political system.  Some tout that the hooey is beyond belief and that platinum shovels were hand-forged for this effort, citing all sorts of thoughts and opinions.  My favorite satirical remark was by Emily Yoffe, a contributor for Slate magazine.  She references the fact that The Secret labels Einstein as a master of the secret, and a teacher too.  Yoffe printed a quote from Einstein that did not make it into the film: Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

Does this mean falling for the secret is part of our fallible nature or looking by something so simple is the plight of our specie?

Inside of me is the x-files lover of unexplained phenomena that wants to believe.  Does it seem remarkably simple?  Yes.  This is part of why this book is found under the genre: metaphysical; on the shelf next to the fill-in-the-blank self-help series.  But what if it is just a basic strength-of-mind trick that allows us to breakdown unseen barriers and find ourselves in opportunistic situations where we empower ourselves to make a decision that grants us a new opening.  Coincidental or not, we have all had things happen to us that have seemed oddly situated and plucked us out of a negative situation and into the womb of positive.  I have the perfect example.

In the late summer of 2002 I was running a kayaking outfitter in southern New Jersey, yet dating a girl in eastern Ohio who was assistant coaching the Buck Eyes field hockey team.  On a whim I decided to drive out and surprise her for the first game of the season that started at noon the next day.  I left at one a.m. on a ten hour drive.  For the mathematically challenged, this does not leave me with much room for error.  I felt this to be a testament as to my affections, so I drove for four hours and pulled over near Harrisburg for a short road nap.  Awaking to a complete fog that had settled on the highway amidst agricultural fields I attempted to start the car.  No dice.  Not even a small click.  Before falling asleep I forgot to turn the lights off.  Now I would never make my narrow window of time.

Exiting the car gave me no more information.  No mile-markers or highway signs were visible in the two minutes I ran in both directions.  The milk-mustached blonde bombshell on the billboard seemed to taunt me in my predicament.  Inside I almost cracked as I wanted to be there with her so bad, but I could not will the situation any more.  Standing outside of my car, ferrari red Riot Glide on top, hull down, I began to dial AAA for assistance, not sure what I would tell them.  Maybe they could triangulate my position.  Before I could hit send, a Jeep Cherokee emerges from the fog and passes me.  It has three white water boats on top.  Stopping a hundred yards ahead, I soon hear the unmistakable whine of a car backing up a high speed.  The driver was a guy I met almost two years before running my first river in Massachusetts, he was on his way to the Youghiogheny River in western PA.

In five minutes my battery was charged, the car running and we were both on our way.  I still have his business card that he gave me that day.  On the back I wrote, ‘get out of jail free card’.  Never would I forget why.  I had not seen him since I ran the Deerfield two years before and I have not seen him since.

Back in my ride, amp’d by the forces that converged on that six am pea soup on the highway between no where and no where, I drove with purpose.  In the end I did get to see Erin before her first game, arriving wired and ecstatic maybe thirty minutes before the start.  She was truly someone who I wanted to see and something allowed it to happen.

So when I ask myself if I believe, I think I do.  I mean…ahem, I do.  But what I do not believe is in paying that much more for it.  In my life I can say I have met one person who wills things and they happen, a true alpha if I ever met one.  Anyone who has crossed his path knows exactly what I am talking about.  Tim Kemple is a guy that makes things happen.  I have a lot of friends that have prospered and been successful on different paths, but Tim always seemed different.  More mono-focally directed.  Whether or not he believes in the laws of attraction, I do not know.  I have not asked him yet, but I am sure he would talk about it.  If anything, Tim just makes what he wants, because that is the way it should be.

We all have an innate ability to create opportunity.  Just like we all have had some wildly perfect experience that has allowed us to make things happen.  We also all know someone in our lives who was the person you never doubted to obtain that which they put their mind towards.  Putting ourselves on the line more often would reveal this.  If there is something I have learned from climbing rocks it is this: want it, envision it, make it happen.  It is that simple.  So simple I may be able to talk myself out of it, before I realize that I already believe it.

Having now re-convinced myself in the power of positive thinking I will aim to apply it to a handful of goals upon which my focus rests.  Positive thinking will entail doing the proper research, being experimental yet scientific.  Taking logical steps from the intermediate outcomes and trying to always be psyched.  This whole process does not sound like much of a secret, just a lot of work.  But we often find that if the work is towards a goal we want, then it feels a lot less like work.  And when breaks are made in our favor we can look at them as coincidental or predicated by the endeavor we invest.  I am reminded of a quote that an old friend gave me my freshman year of college.  Originally it is attributed to Socrates, but when he gave it to me it was through another source: The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.

Right now I would settle for the secret to a great bread.  My own endeavoring got me a $40 enameled cast iron pot that I named Castirona.  I thought I was going to have to throw down two hundred bones for a Le Creuset pot.  Instead I endeavored and the solution appeared.  Now I will endeavor my next crust to appear to crack.