Another Week: Number 113

My first polar vortex experience was in January of 2014 when we had to drive Amy to her chemo treatments in Wauwatosa in temperatures of thirteen below zero. I think of the polar vortex as Earth’s toupee, which has become more prone to slippage as ocean temperatures rise, pushing it out of place.

This week, we had another cold snap hanging down in our face. On Tuesday morning, it was seven below with 17 mph northwest winds. The construction guys rehabbing Mitchell School were sporting mesh trucker hats and bare hands. Whatever, dudes. I wore my parka and mittens to walk across the street and vote.

Just after sunset, around 5:35, I was on my couch working on my laptop when I felt my house shake. The sensation was as if somebody had slammed the front door hard in a huff — but I was the only one here.

It turned out that a house had exploded about 240 yards northeast of me, a block north of the school. Neighbors helped two people escape and noted they had just gotten a new stove. My neighbor Angela knows the victims, a father and his adult daughter, from walking her dogs past their house and says they’re very nice people. The woman’s son says she’s getting skin grafts in Milwaukee.

The only other time I recall Matt Salemme circling our neighborhood in News Chopper 12 was two years ago, for gunfire on the next block. It’s a disturbing kind of scrutiny.

I walked zero miles this week.

The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne

Recently, I’ve been packing up selected books from my shelves and running them to CVS as donations for the AAUW Book Sale. Most of these were books of Amy’s that I don’t see myself cracking in my remaining years.

Among them was The Secret, the 2006 bestseller by Australian television writer and producer Rhonda Byrne about manifesting everything you desire from the universe through the “law of attraction.”

Whether Amy read it, I do not know. It might have been gifted to her or something. She wasn’t one for woo-woo stuff — no religion, no astrology, no psychics. She liked dogs and good people.

Meanwhile, I had grown up with a mom intrigued by the prophecies of Nostradamus and the prosperity theology of Norman Vincent Peale.

I saw both sides. Although I applauded skeptics like James Randi, I also attended Zig Ziglar seminars and devoured Carlos Castaneda and Joseph Campbell.

Rather than immediately donating it a couple of weeks ago, I decided to read The Secret. The book is an add-on to the film version that preceded it in 2006, which I have not seen.

It’s a slick little volume, printed on thick stock, over an aged parchment background, with titles in an old handwriting font. A good percentage of the content consists of quotes from a whole stable of positive-thinking gurus, which Byrne expands upon and bridges in chapters such as “The Secret to Money,” “The Secret to Relationships,” “The Secret to Health,” and so on.

On the one hand, The Secret was justifiably ridiculed during the height of its publicity for, among other things, postulating that all misfortune is also the result of the law of attraction. Critics pointed to the 2,977 people killed on 9/11 and the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. They all brought this on themselves?

I mean — Byrne herself will turn 74 next month and not too many humans are around to see 120.

On the other hand, I am sitting on a couch that was once just an idea in my mind, typing on a laptop that I first visualized, listening to a singer who dreamt of having her music widely enjoyed, who sang a song about dreams that really do come true — before she died of cancer at 33.

Like many people, I have seen extremely unlikely things become reality after first envisioning them. Even while reading the book, one of its gurus suggested holding the image of someone you haven’t talked to in a long time. My hair stood on end when my nephew texted me that night.

The main teaching of The Secret is to nurture your thoughts and feelings toward abundance, gratitude, joy, and love. That can’t hurt.

I feel like this was a nudge in a direction that I needed now. At the very least, this sort of course correction puts you on a more productive track and gets your imagination working on wonderful outcomes instead of worrying.

Rather than pull apart The Secret‘s mechanics, I am instead grateful for whatever hidden hands have passed books to me throughout my life and reminded me to leave some room for magic.