The One Part Of The Secret That Sucked Marginally Less Than The Rest Of It

A former coworker once forced me to read The Secret. Believe it or not, I am occasionally reluctant to hurt people’s feelings, so when she came into my office singing the book’s praises, I tried to listen with an open mind. She told me how she had declared her intention to meet a man a by a certain date and, wouldn’t you know, the Universe sent her one a few days before the deadline. I refrained from speculating that she subconsciously felt the deadline looming and latched onto the first Mr. OMG Right Now who passed by in order to justify her faith in the book, because I’m not a totally terrible person. Long story short, she gave me her copy to borrow over a long weekend and I agreed to read it, which I did because A) all a girl’s got in this world is her word (especially after her looks fade) and B) I assumed there would be a quiz on the contents.

Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography

Y’all know me well enough by now to guess that I didn’t end up being a fan of thinking your way to abundance. Actually, after my coworker left the organization and we fell out of touch, I more or less forgot about The Secret.  I was reminded of it, however, a couple of weeks ago when Brazen Careerist featured a blog post by someone touting the merits of the book’s philosophy, then again during a recent spate of solicited advice giving and finally during a discussion of this article on the effects of social relationships on life span at one of my internet haunts. The reason The Secret came to mind was the  applicability in these conversations of the one idea in the book (and a throwaway one at that) that I felt had any merit  –  the need to create the context that supports what you want your life to be like. The advice isn’t unique to The Secret, of course. Every list of diet tips ever no doubt exhorts you to keep only “healthy” food in your kitchen to avoid the “temptation” to gorge on Cheetos or order takeout Thai from the comfort of your couch. And certainly The Secret took it to a weirdly unsettling extreme ( I vaguely remember a woman who only slept on one side of her bed and emptied out one side of her closet as a signal to the Universe that she was ready for it to send her her proverbial other half – creepy).

But the idea that your immediate surroundings and routines should support your goals and desires instead of opposing them is a solid one. I might desperately want a dog, but if I live on the 26th floor of a pet-free highrise smack in the middle of Manhattan, well, that isn’t exactly a Fido-friendly lifestyle is it? Or if you’d dearly love to be coupled up, but work 16-hour days and spent your weekends restoring furniture in your basement all alone, is it any wonder that you’re single? If all you want in life is to be the next Meryl Streep, would you settle for crossing your fingers and hoping that Scorsese might stop by to catch you in a Des Moines dinner theater production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and whisk you off to Hollywood to star next to Leonardo DiCaprio in a prime piece of Oscar bait? No, you would not. And if you did/do, you’re hopelessly naive and probably going to end up on the casting couch of a sleazy pseudo “agent” who doubles as a muffler salesman. I hate to be the bearer of bad news.

Your actions have to match your intentions, or you’re not going to get any closer to what you want. Willing it to happen won’t work. Ditto, pining, sighing, daydreaming, cutting out little pictures and sticking them on a board or confining yourself to one side of the bed (What about people whose beds are so small they don’t have sides? What about them, writers of The Secret?). You don’t have to get all slick and finger-gunned out (and as a champion of the organic, I would advise against that anyway), but you do have to get your head in the game and give a little in order to get. Few of us are in a position that employers, prospective paramours, elite colleges and Hollywood directors are politely lining up at our doors to recruit us into awesomeness (Luckily, we’re not besieged with skeevy muffler salesmen, either). We have to at least meet ’em halfway (which isn’t Des Moines, btw) by focusing on the factors in our lives that are within our control and that we can change to better reflect our wants. And it can start with baby steps. Maybe it’s volunteering at an animal shelter to get a taste for whether you have the temperament for pet ownership. Maybe it’s scouring the internet for other like-minded locals interested in restoring vintage furniture to hang out with on the weekends and getting away from the solitary varnish fumes. Maybe it’s realizing that being a transgendered aspiring urban planner means that you may have to move away from where you grew up in rural Kentucky in order to access a fuller scope of opportunities.

Bottom line? If you’re longing for something other than your current reality, you’ve gotta make the way you live support the way you want to live. And there’s no secret to that.