I think I maybe started thinking about the idea of “manifesting” when she-who-will-be-known-as-Piefessor mentioned something about her and Weetabix’s winning some art they really liked and wanted at a craft fair. That’s pretty cool, right? I’ve been talking and thinking and emailing about it all week. The idea, if I understand correctly, is that you sort of…I don’t know, you sort of imagine what you want your life to look like, or an event you want to happen, and then I guess you…tell the universe? Somehow? That that’s what you want? And then you just keep your eyes open and see what happens. I’m making it sound hippie woo-woo, which of course it totally is, but it’s probably what I used to call praying or “giving to God” in my Teen Evangelist days.
Last night at dinner with Anne-Carolyn I was talking to her about this, about how I’d written five pages the other night in my paper journal about all this stuff I want in my life. Different qualities (patience, kindness) I want to express, various situations I’d like to find myself in (dancing more and better, writing more and better), even stupid things like having a good weekend or to be able to find a signature scent that comes in oil formation instead of perfume because I can never smell perfume properly. She told me about a baritone opera singer guy she knows, who’s apparently in his dream role right now. He said that when he was starting his career, doing all the crap apprentice jobs that I guess singers have to do while they’re paying their dues, he would lie in bed every night and envision, in great detail, himself playing the role he currently has. “’I could see it, touch it, taste it, even smell it,’ he told me” said Anne-Carolyn. “’By the time I actually got the role, years later, I was ready for it. Because I’d already done it. I’d been doing it for a long time.”
Even though I’ve been thinking so much about all this, about the value of declaring your intentions to the world, so to speak, I can’t figure out how it works. What’s the connection between our intentions and what happens to us. Do things really even happen or do we make them happen? Is there such a thing as fate? Is there such a thing as free will? Does our behavior have any real impact on the world, on other people, or is it more random, messier, less controllable and predictable? What’s the value of careful planning, of detailed envisioning, of making good grades and showing up every day, and what’s the value of being in the right place at the right time?
Well, all my amateur pseudo-philosophizing aside, I still think there’s something to the whole idea. There’s something to just writing it all down, just acknowledging that you want what you want, even though you’re not sure how to get it or even what your life will look like, how it will change, if you do get it. So today I’m manifesting a good weekend that will maybe involve a bike ride with my poor tonsillectomied housemate and the successful cleaning out of my closet to donate to all the hurricane victims, all the three-week old ones and the newly minted ones. In fact, I’m really really really manifesting, not to mention hoping and praying and crossing my fingers, that people evacuating from Rita in Texas and in poor beleagured New Orleans, will stay as safe as possible. I’m manifesting the realization of the Top Secret Plans, always in the back of my mind. I’m manifesting a wonderful thirtieth birthday for my dear friend Manya, who’s thirty today even though she’s secretly ten in my heart. I’m manifesting peace.
There’s no way to empirically prove that I or anyone has any effect on any of those things, just by what boils down to basically wishing real hard, but I’m going to pay attention and see what happens anyway.