Lee Davy continues his confessions series writing about the importance of keeping an open mind and using a little bit of magic to set you on your path.
I’m walking down the high street when I see Peter. We hug. We embrace. We marvel at the coincidence of bumping into each other. We had met only once while on holiday in Johannesburg. He lives in Dubai. We are standing in a crowded high street in Cardiff.
I take him to a Mexican restaurant. I order water. He orders wine. He asks me about life. I talk about poker, addiction and smoothies. He talks about the deteriorating health of his mother, helping people overcome the fear of flying, and his work as an air traffic controller.
I take a sip of water. His enchilada arrives, as do my plantain tacos. He continues to tell me how, and forgive the forgetfulness of the minutiae; he was suspended from work after confused communication resulted in two aircraft becoming too close for comfort. Apparently, the confusion occurred because the two planes in question had similar code names. One had the code name ’22’ and the other ‘222′.
The plantain slipped out of my taco and slumped onto my plate like a sweet slippery slug.
“222?”
The night before meeting a guy from Dubai who I had only met once in Johannesburg while walking down the street in Cardiff I was reading a book called E-Cubed: Nine More Energy Experiments That Prove Manifesting Magic and Miracles is Your Full Time-Gig. The book author, Pam Grout, suggested an experiment where I thought about the following items for a 72 hr period and then make a note of how many of them would appear in my life.
1. A belly laugh
2. A toy from your childhood
3. Your favourite song from high school
4. A beach ball
5. A senior citizen in a fashionable hat
6. A smile from a baby
7. A billboard message for you
8. The number 222
Sticking with the airplane theme and on December 17, 1903, a young man who ran a bicycle shop by the name of Orville Wright became the first man in history to take flight in a powered aircraft. Wright flew the plane over a distance of 255 metres in 59 seconds of flight time.
On May 21, 1927, the handsome and debonair Charles A. Lindbergh became the first man to fly from New York to Paris, solo, and nonstop. The aircraft he used was an experimental plane called The Spirit of St. Louis and you can see it if you happen to visit the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington.
Was it coincidental that I would bump into Pete, take him for an enchilada and listen as the words ‘222′ fell out of his cheese sodden mouth?
Is Pam Grout a magician?
I don’t know, and I don’t care.
There was a time when I would listen to this tale and white rabid like foam would emerge from the corners of my mouth. My thoughts were as straight as a pencil. This parasitic like chudder was mumbo-jumbo. It was bollocks. Back then I was a grumpy git, conditioned via a lifetime of turgid transcriptions of tales of woe from parents who never had enough, and never thought life was good enough.
It was also a time when I never did anything. I woke up, brushed my teeth, drove to work, hated it for eight hours, drove home, watched TV, asked my wife for sex, listened to her say no, acted like a petulant child, read the Hobbit to my son, kissed him on the forehead and climbed into my freezing cold bed.
Everyone around me was telling that I was lucky to have what I had. I was privileged, and that life was grand. I didn’t even know that anything was amiss. I believed them. It’s not until now, years later, when I step out of that time capsule and realise that I was being held down with an energy field full of negativity and lack of progress.
That perpetual raincloud of doom didn’t soak Charles A. Lindbergh and the Wright Brothers. Had they been they would never have been able to create the idea, and take the risks to fly over them. And shit happens. Lindbergh’s two-month-old son was kidnapped and never returned to him. Can you comprehend such madness?
Shit happens.
Bad shit.
All of the time.
But we have a choice.
We can invest time and energy getting interested in that stuff, or we can believe in magic. We can write down affirmations like “I am a great writer.” We can meditate on being a great writer. We can do some EFT on being a great writer. We can write “I am a great writer” on our fridge, use it as a screen saver on our laptop, and order “I am a great writer” toilet paper printed on it.
We can ask our friends and family to remind us that we are a great writer. We can say gratitude that we are a great writer. We can journal that we are a great writer. We can have great writer parties, with great writer balloons, and a great writer cake.
Does this shit work?
I don’t know.
But every time I doubt myself I think of the number ‘222.’
