I asked this question on Triiibes and at Social Work prn. Bob and I talked about it, too. I even asked on Vloggerheads. Now I’m going to ask it here.

What do you need?

I got a bit muddled this afternoon and went out on the porch with my markers to sort it out. I dribbled my brain out onto the paper for awhile, finger painting, listening to the wind and the rustling of branches and the sound of quiet Austin heat (104 degrees, to be precise). What I finally came up with was the sort of complete divine inspiration that makes you groan and complain about all the hard work before you smarten up and say “Thank you, Universe, for being so generous with your sublime wisdom…”

And then you sit with your head between your knees waiting for the dizziness to subside.

Ow.

The only part I can share with you now—the only part that lends itself to words, though I’ve got the rest down in rainbow marker doodles in my notebook—is this: “Stop selling. Start helping.”

The thing is, I think selling is fine. There’s nothing wrong with making a living—there’s a lot right about making a living. Being able to support yourself doing what you love is essential for those of us who intend positive changes in the world around us. Hell, it often makes the difference between being able to make those changes and just dreaming about them! But making good things happen can be a weird, winding path. And sometimes the way isn’t clear. Sometimes you just have to listen to your impulses.

Sometimes your gut says crazy things, and sometimes it says things that make perfect sense. In this case, I can’t ignore it. I don’t completely understand the options here, but I seem to know which way to walk.

It’s just that it’s scary, and I know you know all about it. I’ve been rolling without a safety net for almost a year now and there’s a (rather large) part of me that just wants all the money to show up already. You know what that feels like. It’s difficult to do anything but follow the cash; it’s difficult to pull yourself away down the path you’re meant to take when the path with the little baby money plants with the sprouting dollar bills just looks so easy. Oooh, there’s my rent payment, you’re thinking. There’s the electric bill. Ooh! There’s next week’s groceries! That’s the path I need! Right? Right? That’s it, isn’t it?

It’s not.

Your gut is telling you it’s not.

The money plants don’t stand the test of time, and their path doesn’t have heart. They don’t bear fruit for long. They won’t make you happy—no matter how good they look now. So you have to decide—I have to decide—what I really want. What is meaningful to me. What brings me joy. What makes an impact. What takes me forward in the direction I really want to go, deep down in the soul of me, what draws me forward with more than just the urge to pay my bills. With the urge to…

Well, I think you know the rest. It’s that really important thing. The light. The Point.

Anyway…

We are so overdue for the next Idea Free-For-All.

What do you say, guys? Monday?

What do you need help with?

You know, I didn’t expect Wanted to be such a good movie. I thought it would be fun, but I didn’t expect it to feel so purposeful for me. I don’t know if you’ll see the same things I did, but for me it was very clear. What do you do when the universe speaks to you?

“Insanity is wasting your life as a nothing when you have the blood of a killer flowing in your veins. Insanity is being shit on, beat down, coasting through life in a miserable existence when you have a caged lion locked inside and a key to release it.”

Now quit considering this solely in context of the movie and just pay attention for a second.

You are an amazing complex machine—and “machine” doesn’t at all connote just how incredibly perfect you are. You are capable of absurdly amazing things. You can break bonds, divide oceans, move mountains. You can do anything. To forget that is insane. To take your life for granted is insane. To waste your innate potential is horrifying. It’s shameful. It’s… Dude, it makes me want to cry.

You have so much that you can do. There are so many people you can help—there are so many ways in which you can make a difference. Little ways, big ways. Add them up and you can’t even imagine the effect that one person has on the rest of the world. You can’t even guess. Why would you hand that power away? Why would you pretend you’re something else? Something… ordinary?

Why would you let life destroy you without putting up a fight? This is why I dig superhero movies, man. Because they’re fucking real. The story of any superhero is our story, it tells us how we get up off our asses and do something true.

Why would you stand around and be a victim of circumstances when you could be out there changing something?

That’s insane. And it’s sad. And it gets me riled up. It makes me angry. It makes me make faces, gesture wildly, it makes a big question mark appear over my head, ping, this is a Megan who is confused. Because I just don’t understand how any of us can waste ourselves that way.

I just don’t.

I can’t think of a single good reason. I don’t want to hear the same old excuses. But I’d love to know why.

Why, when you have the tools to do something different?

Why did you writhe out of the muck and sprout eyeballs? Why did you eat and grow and defend your little swath of mud and eat and grow some more? Why did you battle encroaching foes and procreate and drag yourself slowly, painfully up the food chain? Why are you here? Why is having arms and legs so grand? What’s the point of your big, complicated brain if you don’t use it?

What are we here for, if not to make things happen?

What are we here for, except that we can?

I feel insanely passionate about making people understand their options—their talents, their strengths, their innate holy-cow-ness—but I mostly think in terms of people who are living the same kind of life I am. People who have a place to live, family and friends, emotional support, access to (sometimes very) basic health information and services, transportation, and food. People who find themselves in scary situations, sure, but people who already have a very decent foundation on which to build a better life for themselves. I had thought some about people without those things before reading The Blue Sweater, but I don’t know if I thought about it enough. My passion for waking people up to their own potential hasn’t changed, but I have to wonder now what one has to do with the other.

What does confidence and purpose and passion and awareness mean if you can’t eat? Can’t keep yourself healthy? Can’t keep a roof over your head? I believe they can make the difference between a person who stays poor and a person who improves their own lot, but there are still missing pieces. If you don’t have a certain basic quality of life, can you even spare energy to consider these things? If I found myself without any resources, maybe I could—because I’ve already done it, I already know how and I’ve seen the results. But it’s hard enough to raise yourself up when you have most of your needs met. I’m having a hard time imagining the same process without family, food and shelter. When I say I’ve had a hard time buying groceries, I mean it—but I will probably always be able to eat somehow, even in the hardest of times. If I couldn’t eat, if I had to live out in the elements… I probably wouldn’t be preaching to you about confidence and purpose and passion and awareness.

I wouldn’t have the guts.

Would I?

Is there something to all of this, even for people who have much graver concerns than I do? Most of the people reading this blog do have their basic needs met, do have some resources to draw on, many of them (I might argue all of them, because I always do) are in an excellent position to mindset+action themselves into the place they want to be. Anyone with access to the internet has a huge array of options at their disposal. “I can’t” means less and less to you and I every single day. But what about everybody else?

I suppose this is one of the reasons the work of Acumen Fund appeals to me—they’re not about hand-outs or charity projects. They’re about giving people the tools to build themselves up. I resonate powerfully with that mission. It’s what I want, too. Teach a man to fish, folks. And maybe it’s just a difference in scale: Teach a man to fish. Teach him to connect with others. Teach him to use the internet. Let him teach others. Help him set up a fish consulting business. Make him the primary source on the web for fish information products. Then he has a fish empire. He’ll be fine.

Nope. I don’t know what it all means yet. But I’d love to hear what you think.

I’ve been wondering for a long time when it would be important to clarify this, and as it turns out, now’s the time. This is very important:

You’re the one who decides whether I’m talking to you.

You’re the one who decides whether the things I say are relevant, whether they apply to you and your circumstances. It’s up to you to decide whether it’s right and appropriate for you to act on them. The fact that I’ve said them is a very small part of the equation. (In fact, it pretty much means nothing at all.)

You’re the only one who can make decisions about how you live your life. I can’t do it for you—I couldn’t if I wanted to. (And I don’t.)

The truth is, most of my blogging here is an exercise in talking to myself. I started out doing this for me, and I still am—even though there is now an amazing group of incredibly appreciative people that I keep in mind when I think about what I should write next. Still, I’m writing for my own sake.

If you’re listening, please listen for yours.

So if we’re talking about obligation, yes, I do feel obligated—in a truly positive way—to experience bonkers, amazing growth in a whole ton of different ways. I realize that the strange contrast between that positive obligation and other “obligations” I perceive as negative is absolutely nuts. But for now, that positive obligation is important to me. When I write here, I’m speaking to the people who resonate on my frequency. If you don’t, find something else that makes you feel good, helps you solve problems, teaches you more about yourself, and leads you in the right direction (for you).

My job is to say what I think. If it’s useful, run with it. If it’s not, let it go. If you get something out of it, stick around. If you don’t, go on about your business. We’re cool. :}

You know… I never really listened to these lyrics. And now that I’ve have, I’ve been playing this one song over and over:

As of last night, there is no doubt in my mind that eating more raw produce puts me in a more emotion-based state of mind. I feel moved more often. I feel connected. I verge on tears more often, in a way that identifies what is important to me, what must happen next, what it’s time for me to do. All issues with internal and external motivation aside, the explosion of emotional growth I’m experiencing has served as a compass for the decisions I make and the energies I expend. I’m getting more sensitive to it all the time. It’s one of the things that makes me truly wonder about being completely, 100% raw, even considering the dramatic change that would mean for my lifestyle. (Well, I suppose I’ve undergone some pretty dramatic changes already. Big deal, right?)

For those of you who are curious, I’m not completely sure when the step from 90% raw to 100% raw will happen (or if it will happen?), but I have a feeling there will be a time for it and I’ll know when that time is. I’m looking for the right route, the one that feels the best and results in the healthiest, strongest, most stable Megan. It’s not going to be exactly like anyone else’s, but that’s what makes it interesting. ;}

I feel like I’m understanding, in touch with, more than ever. Or maybe it all just spoke too quietly for me to hear, or maybe I just wasn’t listening. And although I’ve been following these ideas for awhile now, the understanding just continues to get… louder.

Your number has been called. Don’t let yourself down, don’t let yourself go. Your last chance has arrived. You’ve got to be the best, you’ve got to change the world and use this chance to be heard. Your time is now.

That’s pretty straightforward, folks.

Listen to the band.

Please watch through to the end—you’ll be glad you did.

Nabbed from NJ Thompson’s del.icio.us stream and Six Pixels of Separation.

There is no feeling quite like gratitude.

If you’re feeling bad, or tired, or negative, or angry, or scared, or worn down, or doomed, or deadened, the salve you’re searching for is gratitude. Hell! If you’re feeling great and want to do something neat, want to funnel your energy in an excellently positive direction, gratitude’s your man.

I participated in my first (and only) sweat lodge almost a year ago at Burning Flipside, and one of the things that stood out about my experience was the effect gratitude has on me. It was very intense emotionally, but the most intense part was the gratitude. It was also the most important part, though I didn’t know exactly why. It was an essential part of everything. Maybe it’s the life blood of the cosmos. Whatever it was, it was powerful.

I learned to generate gratitude accidentally, when I was at a Learning Strategies weekend seminar. Millicent hooked me up to a (somewhat silly) heart rate game and told me to send love to the planet. So I did. It felt surprisingly awesome. I didn’t know I could send love to something until I tried sending love to something, but that wasn’t even the best part. Sending love is neat, but an amazing side effect of sending love was discovering that I could manufacture gratitude out of nothing.

Feeling feelings on purpose instead of just reactively is a super useful tool (for dozens of reasons). With very little practice I have gotten to the point where I can be grateful for something completely random, or absolutely nothing. Sometimes I use it to encourage good behavior in my body (like remembering something useful, or having sudden inspiration, or staying particularly healthy, or doing a new feat of physical exercise), but sometimes I use it just to feel good. I’m grateful for you, universe, I say. I’m grateful to be in you / around you / you. You are freaking awesome.

Sometimes I give my unconscious a cake. Hello, unconscious dudes, I say. Here is a nice cake for you! (I have noticed in the past that the cakes I give to my unconscious dudes are always normal mainstream cakes—expensive sugarsome confectionary concoctions, the kind of thing I craved before my jihad against poison. I don’t know what this means, but feel free to psychoanalyze.) In whatever case, it’s a symbol of gratitude. (Or of bribery.)

As I got better at it, I didn’t give cakes so often anymore. I mostly just created the feeling.

I can make it very very intense. Grateful! It floods me, it’s warm and electric and extremely mellow. It tends to obliterate lesser feelings. It fills up and heals and makes better.

It’s quite worth a try!

I recommend starting with something you know you’re grateful for, and focusing on feelin’ the feelin’. Pay attention to the shape and texture of it, the expanse of it, taste and color, and remember what it feels like to feel it. Later on, you can make it happen just by remembering it and feeding it.

Go! Gratitudify.

At some indeterminate point in the last few years, I began to feel emotions much more strongly than I used to. Most of the time, they’re normal. But more and more, they rise like a tide, or hit me like a wave. (WHACK! Broadsides me.)

The really amazing ones are about people. An urge to connect with someone—to get to know them better, to find out what makes them who they are. A realization or an epiphany, like suddenly understanding something that hadn’t occurred to me before. Or last night, in the car, when I had this flash of insight: Em and I are both doing what means something to us. We’re doing what feels powerful and right. I thought about that from the perspective of my parents, and I thought about how many people never do that thing, in their whole lives... and I felt an overwhelming pride, that I’m part of this family, that I’m doing what I do, that I have a sister like her, and that we have parents that—for all our collective domestic flaws—raised us to be the kind of people we are. Whatever that actually means.

And that we’re only going to grow from here.

Music is a powerful emotional trigger for lots of people, but it’s gotten much bigger for me. Old music, new music. Em’s work is becoming a large part of the ongoing soundtrack of my aspirations to world domination, slowly but surely. And usually the music that moves me is about people. Connections, plans, urges, motivations. There are so many subtle pieces that fit together in complex ways, and I often feel like I can hear all of them. They all have an effect on me.

So why is this happening? There’s obviously a difference from even just a year ago. Maybe I’m growing up. It could have a lot to do with food: I’ve certainly been eating progressively better over the last several years, and I’m more solidly whole-fresh-produce now than ever. (I’ve read enough about food changing one’s perception of the universe that I think that’s a pretty good bet, right there.) I’ve also been making incredible in-roads in terms of learning about and understanding myself and other people. I’m doing things, now, that have great purpose for me, that make me feel something. And let’s not forget that I’ve been off birth control for at least a year and a half. (Hormones, anyone?) There are lots of explanations—and maybe all of them have a part in it.

Whatever the reason, it’s increasing steadily. Maybe I will be an emotional experience superhero by this time next year. The thing that bothers me, though, is that I’m not sure what to do with it. It’s fascinating (sometimes exhilarating) to experience, but other than leveraging it to motivate me to bigger and bigger pursuits (which I do), I almost feel like it’s not useable. Is that not enough? Is there something else?

There’s this part, too: I am wanting more and more connection, and I am less and less patient with my inability to communicate what I’m feeling. How do you tell someone you’re that proud of them? How do you tell someone you value them that much? Words fail me.

Maybe I just need new words…?

Here are the links I promised to include:
Evil Web Valentine for you! (Pass it on!)

Add your evil Valentine’s quote on this page:
Valentines for Villains Squidoo page (with Twttrstrm, if you use Twitter)

I hope you have enough of a Monday left to have a GREAT one – this was meant to be posted earlier, but video editing takes me a damn long time. In any case, uh… Happy Early Valentine’s Day, too. ;}