My secret garden

Anyone within earshot knows that my job has been getting me down. Ever since the new year, our department has been slammed. I work long hours doing a job that generally doesn't fit my skills and interests, and sometimes I don't get a breath of fresh air until 6pm. I often sit and wonder how I landed at such a desk, in such a place, after having a career that I loved so much in Seattle. Well, I met up with some girlfriends for dinner a couple weeks ago. A conversation with my friend about my job led to talk about "The Secret". She went through the gist of the book, and I gathered what I could over the Friday night hoppin' restaurant din. The gist: think positively, good things will come. (I'm sure Oprah, Dr. Oz, or both have exploited "The Secret" and its concepts.)

This isn't news. I've held on tight to my book "Creative Visualization" by Shakti Gawain for about 8 years now. The pages have yellowed. The principles of Creative Visualization are that energy is magnetic, and form follows thought. When I apply myself, the practices outlined help me get what I want. I've envisioned things or events that I want to happen, and made "treasure maps" and wrote out scenes as I want them to unfold. It's uncanny how many things have manifested when I put some time into envisioning my ideal scenario, from giving a work presentation with confidence, to meeting an awesome guy, to being approved for our mortgage.

I haven't read The Secret, but I believe it tells a similar story. After our conversation, I decided I was tired of holding onto a mess of negativity related to my job. It's destructive, exhausting, and unhelpful. I decided to think happy job-related thoughts, and got motivated by putting myself back on the right professional path. I had an upfront conversation with my manager, and contacted some colleagues, mostly people that I don't know, to talk about opportunities. I contacted other people within the urban planning field, both to volunteer and to inquire about their jobs and and the paths that led them there. It's within my reach to write my own story. At the risk of veering into cheese-saturated self-helpdom, I really do believe this.

When we were looking to buy a house last summer, I fell in love with ours, and getting a mortgage was a long, drawn out process that involved a charade of inept lenders on the other end of the line. There were a few months of high stress paper trails, and at times we felt that this house was going to slip through our fingers. To make myself feel better, I wrote out an ideal scene and found it recently. In it, I described our yard as a secret garden, a respite from the world. Do you agree?