Someone asked me recently what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wasn’t sure if he said what I want to be (as in, sometime, presumably soon, in the near future) or what I wanted to be, as in, when I was a kid.
What I wanted to be, in both chronological and order of obsessive fantasy was:
1- Madonna’s Daughter (Yes, she picks me up at camp in a bedazzled tour bus, sings me to sleep with “you must be my lucky star” and loves to custom coordinate mother/daughter lace wardrobes, à la mid-80’s.)
2- Broadway Star (Life is big melodramatic belty show tunes surrounded the gay men who love them, and post show cosmos at Joe Allen’s of course, à la mid-90’s.)
3- Wife and Homemaker (I grow organic spinach in the garden of my West Village brownstone and purée it for baby food. The perfect day consists of meeting with the neighborhood florist, children in tow, confirming deliveries for that evening’s dinner party with my artist friends while fielding business calls en route.)
I think I instead answered the question (and I am probably even misquoting/misremembering myself here): what I want to be when I grow up, and the true answer to that is: I am exactly who I want to be. (Oh, and by the way, I don’t believe in growing up, I believe in getting more childlike, more full of wonder.)
Life is so much more remarkable than I ever could have imagined it.
And this is true. I mean, really really true, not like, ‘let me look around in gratitude and be happy that I can afford romaine lettuce because there are people who are starving in Africa’ true. Or if you live in Syria you’re just pretty much f*ed all around, so count your blessings, yay America. Not a remarkable life in comparison. A remarkable life in experience.
I am more spectacularly happy than I ever thought possible, and technically, not one of the aforementioned dreams is the world I am living in. And not to say those couldn’t happen (well, other than the Madonna thing, I think Lourdes has that all wrapped up,) or haven’t happened to some degree, or that the root of why I want those things has not happened, but those specific things, as I pictured them, are not here, at this moment, and that’s ok.
And not because everything else is so rosy either. Right now, as I type this, there is family drama unraveling that would rival a season finale of “Dynasty” written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
That aside, I’m not going to wax poetic about how utterly contented I am with life because that’s just annoying.
Here’s what I have to say: Dream. Dream big. HUGE. And then love what comes.
Dream 186 horses Royal Wedding big and then find a way to embrace what is under your nose. This is the practice and this is life.
The world is not cruel. Our deepest desires are our soul’s longing to know and experience itself, in these bodies, in this life… to marvel and adore at and on the moments as they sweep towards us in adventures we couldn’t have planned, is the greatest gift we can give ourselves.
My bestie, willclark, and I are discerning. We like and recognize luxury. Not as opulence or in being ostentatious, but in seeing the value of excellence, the virtue of quality. I’ve often said to him why would the universe have given us exquisite taste if we were not to sample the world’s finest cuisine? Our proclivities are housed within us for reason. Life is purposeful in this way.
The higher we rise in consciousness, any sort of manifestation is automatic. Intuition guides us toward what is most beautiful for ourselves (well, it always does) but at higher levels, the span of time in our ability to recognize it as beautiful is what shifts. The gap shortens. All is perfect, with no “needing to get on board the ride.” We are the ride, why would we need to get on board with something we already are?
Everything comes, most beautifully, without our having to “work” for it.
I learned this the long way. The way of, give-everything-up-and-live-with-one-outfit-and-eat-just-rice-and-don’t-wear-make-up-but-sneak-in-a-little-mascara-anyway-and-then-feel-guilty-about-it. This was a valuable practice at the time. A valuable practice to see that I am supposed to be sparkly.
To recognize that I did not need that, I do not define myself by said sparkliness on a material level, but to see that this little mind/body desired it. I needed to recognize the desire to be free of it, and when I did this, the accoutrements of said desire flooded my experience.
I prefer to proffer that it is not our happiness in any situation that designates our levels of consciousness, but rather how comfortable we can be in any situation. I will add to that, how quickly we jounce from the ick determines our happiness and this also just so happens to directly correlate to how quickly we manifest what we want.
I gave a lecture to the Anthony Robbins powerteam in New York about a month ago. After this, one woman called me intrigued and said:
“You know what they say is the common thread amongst Presidents and CEO’s? What is the one quality they all possess? The ability they have to immediately bounce back from a ‘negative circumstance.’”
One of my oldest and dearest friends, a man so close he is family, was a high muckamuck in the Lehman empire. He usually parks it in the grand bar at the Four Seasons when he sweeps through town, scheduling comrades, clients, childhood friends in back-to-back super-short meeting spans over gigantic lemon drop martinis. I don’t remember if it was here or somewhere closer to my hood, where he might have been en route to Babbo or Strip House, but I met him a few months after the fall, curious to see if he would be diminished by the disaster.
He wasn’t. He was leading the London branch of a new hedge fund and I knew he would build it to its own imperium of wealth soon enough. He is not, what one would call, a spiritual man. He pretty much thinks and knows me to be out of my mind. And yet, his perspective on what happened at Lehman was so grounded, even-keel, generous and gracious on a personal level in giving over to the flow of life, that it, honestly, surprised me. This is a leader. This is a man. He takes it as it comes.
I have friends who are millionaires, CEOs, legitimate stars, and friends who are minimalist yogis and rogue philosophers. Each of their levels of success and happiness is in direct relation to how much they can wrap themselves around the reality of the present moment. There is no shortcut.
Life will pull us towards who we are meant to be, and if that is loud and glittery and fabulous then sing it sisath, and if that is calm and quiet and easy, then so it is. Life is meant to give us the fullest expression of itself in the way that WE want it.
All of it can be mindful. In fact, it must be mindful. Royal Wedding intentions while we feel our toes in the sand. That’s how we get there…. to everywhere we’ve ever wanted to be.
