EDIT: And just after I wrote this, a man walked up to me speaking in a German accent. He told me he couldn’t use his own laptop because the wifi wasn’t transmitting to it, and he needed to book a hotel room for him and his wife in Kona, Hawaii, because they had not had time to do it. I let him use my laptop. It turns out, he’s a pilot for Lufthansa. These things aren’t hard to do. Life is an echo. What you give out will come back to you.
Original Story:
Alyson, the Airbnb host where I was staying in Silverlake walked up to the top of the stairs and welcomed me the morning after my late arrival. It was her day off. Her bleached blond hair was pulled back and she was wearing long john pajamas and a really scruffy robe that went down to the floor.
“It’s my day off, so I am going to garden, but I wanted to say hi to you since you got in so late last night.”
Her husband had shown me in, and walked up two flights of stairs. AND he had a herniated disk that he’s been trying to heal for the past eight months through organic methods.
“I gave up this month,” he tells me as he draws me a glass of water from the filtered tap. “I went to a doctor today, I can’t take it anymore.” I couldn’t believe it. Walking around for eight months with a herniated disc. How do you survive.
He shrugs. Pain killers, the good kind.
Alyson is standing at the door in the late morning and her two dogs run in, and she starts talking about how she let them outside last night. But this is so classically LA. She goes:
“I let them out last night to party. I don’t want them messing up the place.”
They are milling about on the bed and jumping on and off the bed. They are two little hyperactive runts. One looks like a cross between a Jack Russell and a Doberman, and, well, we don’t know what the other one is, something like a chihuahua and a greyhound?
I’m having a good day, and packing for the airport. I just got a new job. I’m moving to the West Coast from NYC in a few weeks. My head is dizzy. I call a cab. I tell my family the news. I call J. and tell her the news first. She can’t believe it. Her heart is pounding. I thank her. She thanks me. She’s a grateful person.
Now I am sitting at the airport waiting to go home and all these people are filing past me with their bags on their shoulders. If it was the third world they would be hauling bags of beans or coffee grounds, or linens to sell in the market. People on the move.
People changing. People being starstruck and amazed at seeing their work pay off into the shape of their dreams. Every one of them, whether they are speaking Cantonese into a phone, or slapping hands off the plane and talking in ghetto slang. They were in one place a few hours ago, and they are arriving at a new place looking forward to new things, or dreading new things, but whatever it is, this moment is different than the last one.
The mind is travel. It’s not about holding on to the moment at all. It’s about having a vision and acting through that vision in the moment, and realizing that every micro-transaction that is happening is your dream.
The things that bore you, the things that spark you. That’s your dream talking to you.
You don’t have to be asleep to see it happen. I like doing my life awake.
I am watching this guy in the airport on his phone. He’s waiting for someone getting off the plane. He just came from another plane, another flight. He wants to know where to meet his friend.
I thought for a moment he was in a reality show, like the Amazing Race, and then I thought, I wonder what is going on between him and the other person, and what that feels like, to be on one flight, wanting to meet someone on another flight.
Then I thought, what a wonderful world this is. YOu can climb into the belly of a 125 ton beast. It will haul you across the skies to meet your friend. It parks delicately at the gate and all the people spill out, and you put the phone away.
And there is your friend.
To me this is a metaphor for the work of life. The avocation of life. So much makes life possible, makes it at our disposal. Life is not easy. But leading your life with your heart and your dreams is easy. It sometimes doesn’t feel good to do it. You do get crushed. You miss things. You fail.
But that action is so easy.
Think of all those times you watched the wheels touch down on videos of airplanes landing. Maybe you saw that in a scene from a movie.
So gentle, the bulk of your life touching down at hundreds of miles an hour. All the mechanical engineering that got you there made everything so easy.
The fundamental circle of the wheel. The support it brings.
You coast to a stop and the door opens.
Douglas Crets is an intelligence officer and expert network builder for the social web. Using his training in journalism, digital media, anthropology and the humanities, he creates social media research projects for and about the leading social web entrepreneurs of today. His company, dB C Media provides companies and individuals with data, behavioral research studies, branding advice, consulting on social media execution and meaningful media content to create efficient interactions with consumers, and influencers and on the web, so that brands, companies and individuals can form relationships that matter. His traveling takes him to at least 12 countries a year. He speaks Russian and understands Chinese.
