I finally got around to visiting the whole “The Secret” phenomenon recently. I didn’t read the book, I went straight to the dvd. You know, this is the book that has suddenly (re)revealed the power of positive thinking and claims everything from finding a parking spot to wealth if you just ‘ask,’ ‘visualize,’ and ‘receive.’ There has been a lot of speculation about this latest self-help trend; The Stranger wrote about The Secret and hated it, Oprah (of course) loved it, and spiritual leaders are offended.

I so wish I could find the power of positive thinking. As it is, the idea of ramming nothing but positive thoughts into my my brain sounds exhausting. I’ve always told myself, “It could be worse.” And I say this often: My long commute? My hideous job? My rickety right knee? Well, it could be worse (it could be a longer commute, a service job, an amputated knee). Now, according to The Secret it could be a whole lot better–if I only put my mind to it. If I want to make $100,000 a year I need to write it on a piece of paper and affix it to my ceiling so that every morning I wake up and see it. If I want love in my life I have to exude nothing but loving energy (which believe me is WORK) all the time and I will ATTRACT love back.

OK, so the law of attraction has some merit. You know how you kinda have a hankering for something and it just sort of pops up? There have been times when a strange, unconscious desire has popped into my head and has been executed with an amazing ease. Taking a walk seven years ago in the mountains I decided that when I moved to Ft. Collins I wanted to be a modern dance teacher…and I was. With very little effort I visualized my life as a dance teacher and found the perfect job posting online a few months later. I wanted desperately to move to Seattle after Josh graduated, I visualized, prayed, exerted a ton of mental force on the idea that we might get out of CO. It was a hideous time, but here we are…in Seattle.

I’ve sort of categorized my thoughts as:
1) Worry (about life, money, my job, my career, etc) 2) Speculation on the future (”if I do this, we might be able to do this next month.”) 3) The past (”I really learned from that mistake, and yet, here I am getting angry about the same thing”) 4) Hopeful dreaming (one day I’m going to be a Writer, Actor, Dancer, Parent, etc.) and everything else in between. Continual musing on God is thrown into my thought process occasionally (”Are you there God? It’s me Mara…No really, are you THERE?) and extreme doom and gloom (”What would it be like if I got hit by a car today?”) All of this is neither here nor there…and most of it is probably not very Secret-esque. The secret to life is creating whatever you want, whenever you want it, simply by willing it into existence. But what if it just doesn’t happen? Aren’t you kind of setting yourself up?

Case in point: I REALLY wanted to travel with the Thalia cast to Amsterdam in January…they could only take four of us and I knew the odds were stacked against me. I thought about it, focused on it, prayed about it a little…and then realized I was getting obsessed. What good would it have been to put all this effort into ASSUMING I was going…and then not go? The CHANCE, the mere possibility of me going was almost impossible if we look at the science of it all, the statistics, the percentage of likelihood, etc. Sure, I had a greater chance of going to Amsterdam then winning the lottery, but again, the opportunity was slim and it did not present itself. (Although I suppose someone could always get sick, have an emergency, etc. and I could step into her place). Now a true Secret believer would have claimed that I did not want this opportunity badly enough…and this might be true. I could have hung around the theater more (never mind that I’m committed to a different theater currently and when I did show up I sprained my thumb onstage), begged (which I practically did), and focused on nothing but going (polishing my passport in eager awaiting). But what good is that when, really, it just ain’t gonna happen…and no amount of wishing or believing is going to cause it to happen. This lies one of the many flaws of The Secret.

In the meantime, maybe I am just too skeptical to fully believe, hence, I’m going to continue to live my mildly pessimistic, slightly neurotic, vainly hopeful existence.