manifest (your!) destiny?

Goddamn it.

He nailed it. In his latest book, "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals," Oliver Burkeman (see? I'm obsessed) offers some tasty tidbits on our insignificance in the universe. My biggest take away is that I can finally fucking relax and stop forcing my life to Have Meaning, to leave behind any legacies, to bother with anything much at all. Phewf. Thank God. That was getting exhausting.

For me it relates to the idea that you can make your life anything you want to, that you can accomplish whatever you want, that you can actually get that Dream Vacation Home - which one of my myriad online subscriptions keeps telling me. That the capitalist model aka The American Dream (nightmare), applied to your life, can result in you having everything you want and being happy all the fucking time. Which, as we know, is a BIG FAT LIE.

Don't get me wrong, I do fully subscribe to the notion that if you are not digging what you are doing or feeling, then you can change it.

BUT.

There's a whole industry devoted to Manifesting Your Destiny and frankly, if you look closely enough, it generally translates into, 'If you don't have what you want or feel the way you want, it's because you are not trying hard enough.' And we end up again and again at the bottom line of our own inadequacy.

Truth be told, I've been contemplating this whole Manifest Your Destiny thingy for some time now. (Not to be mistaken with Manifest Destiny which is totally not what I thought was once I finally looked it up. I had a vague notion that it was more to do with marxist manifestos when, if fact, it's some delusional idea of the States being the best and infecting the continent with their beliefs, spreading all of the words in the name of God. Even though there is a separation of church and state. WHICH THERE SO OBVIOUSLY IS NOT. Omg. Don't get me started on the US of A. Not yet.) The reason being that there was a period of a few years there when I was totally killing it. Vision boards, visioning, writing, imagining, planning, working towards It, listening to and actually seeing and hearing 'signs', feeling all sparkly and tingly. Making my 'dreams come true.' I did, as Jane tells me, Manifest my own destiny. And maybe I did. Ish.

But what about now? What happens when you accomplished your dreams? What about now when things aren't 'sparkly' and 'tingly' and are just normal?

Turns out normal is also magical. Different. But still magical. Only it's harder to sense and see it, I believe. Chogyam Trungpa (Buddhist wizard who also struggled with being human and may well have been cancelled in MeToo had he been around) talked about Ordinary Magic. The mundane as transcendent. I can get into that. But it's not easy when you feel like you are not accomplishing anything, and should work harder, should work out more, be nicer, volunteer, generally be better at all things ad infinitum.

But Cosmic Insignificance Theory helps in this regard because we don't have to live up to some impossible ideal when we realize that we are a speck of dust in the Grand Scheme of Things and can let go of the erroneous notion that we have to produce tomes or be relentlessly beatific. You don't really matter, so stop trying to act like you do.

However.

I'd like to consider Cosmic Significance Theory: (I'd like to believe I made that up so will not google it) That just by virtue of existing, you are significant. No need to prove it. Relax mother fucker and just Be. That the speck of dust is actually filled with Whos from Whoville and, like Horton who hears the microscopic Whos, we can protect and cherish this speck for the wonder that it is.

Yopp!