Before get get started:
My first book 🎒The Destination is Now is available everywhere books are sold!
I am intrigued by the language of Quantum Physics and its relevance for ordinary life. People like me, without a technical knowledge of the subject, write about the observer effect, which theorizes matter/energy doesn’t actually become something until it is observed. The observer effect often gets translated into some version of manifesting the future you want and thereby making it so. It seems to me there is a very long path between the scientifically replicable experiments that validate that the observer effect is so, and being able to create a future by thinking it into being so. I love and celebrate that, at least for me, mystery is a part of life.
I leave room for things that I can’t explain.
At the same time, I am not a fan of magic. When I use the word magic, I am referring to the use of incantations, or supernatural powers that I can control, to make things happen. I am, however, comfortable with the idea that since we are interconnected with the rest of the Universe, made of the same stuff, interacting with all sorts of unseen dynamics at work in it, we do have some influence. What we think can influence what comes to be so in our future.
My primary sources of information are anecdotal. I have lived 83 years and I have stories to tell. The stories are my ordinary life unfolding in real time. When I read and talk about the mystery of life, the wonders of the Universe as more and more is discovered about what it is made of and how it works- I do so through the lens of my own experience, my stories. The other day one commentator on Instagram referenced the matter of the observer effect in scientific studies in terms of fantasies becoming realities as we move through life. It felt as if she was telling my story, the story of the first weeks after Mary Ann died.
I had mostly been a matter-of-fact sort of fellow. I thought things through to a fault, anticipating contingencies that might arise, problems that would need to be dealt with.
Mary Ann’s death rewired my brain.
I have read about studies that demonstrated the way psychedelics or hallucinogens like psilocybin and ayahuasca work. They apparently can actually make physical changes in the brain.
That article suggested that dramatic emotional experiences can sometimes do the same.
The way I made choices changed after losing Mary Ann. Part of the reason for that change is that I felt I had nothing to lose. My first thought about ideas that popped up in my brain for what to do next changed from, “Why/how would I do that?” to “Why not!” I remember very vividly that change.
A thought popped into my mind: A parishioner had hiked some of the Great Walks on the South Island of New Zealand.
I hadn’t fantasized about it or manifested it, but it was lurking somewhere in my thoughts. Why not! I started making plans and training almost in days. Then: If I am going that far into the Southern Hemisphere, why not add a second month and go to Australia? If I am going to Australia, I have to visit the Snowy Mountains since I had years before become obsessed with the movie, The Man from Snowy River.
Then I came upon horse treks online that were in the Snowy Mountains where the movie was filmed. Why not? Then, it seemed wrong not to snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef.
I had hiked in Colorado on Youth trips to the Rockies, but I was not in shape for thirty-five mile treks through mountains.
I didn’t know how to ride a horse.
I was scared of water, never learned to swim, let alone snorkel.
I didn’t labor over the matter of how I could do those things. I just started training one on one with a physical trainer, started taking horse riding lessons, and swimming lessons (at age of 67).
I didn’t give any of those obstacles a second thought.
As to the matter of the observer effect and the idea of manifesting, I don’t remember thinking in advance, as in having a bucket list. The ideas just popped into my head. I made them so, and then put them in the bucket afterwards. The path from only a wisp of a thought - to fantasy - to a realized experience flowed naturally and surprisingly quickly. I do remember intentionally not thinking about the details of how to accomplish each one, consciously avoiding the dreaded overthinking. I was not going to allow the problems I might encounter to divert me from staying on course to complete them.
The new “why not” approach continued to play out for years, always traveling just with a backpack and electronics bag.
Cornwall came to mind (Dad’s distant ancestry) so I traveled there with my children and on to Germany to Oktoberfest with my son. Why not! Sing with a small choir from a congregation in Texas touring Germany, and as long as I am in Germany, visit my German mother’s birthplace in Poland. Why not! Walk the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, 500 miles on foot carrying a backpack across Northern Spain.
Spend a week in the Taizé community in France on the way to the start of the Camino. Why not! Join a family on a two week trip with their grandpa, Joe, in Budapest and then go on to visit Prague. Why not! Sing in a 1000 voice choir in Vienna. Why not! Travel to Estonia because a young man on the Camino mentioned the choirs there, and spend two months traveling through Scandinavia on to Iceland going to concerts. Why not! Visit friends in Austria and Germany, Scotland and Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, travel with my granddaughter in London, Ireland, France, and Spain. Why not! Then sell or give away all my possessions and start traveling nine to ten months of the year outside the US, spending a few weeks in the spring and in the winter holidays with my family in the US.
I am now three and a half years into almost full time traveling. Including the years I have traveled abroad for only two months a year, it has been fifteen years with my backpack. Year-round traveling has become my normal. I don’t have the same level of interest in tackling challenges as I did when I first started, but I still stay in hostels sometimes, as long as I can get a bottom bunk. Most often it is an Airbnb now. I am not so ready for long hikes or climbing mountains.
As I look through the filter of these stories from my life’s experience at the matter of the observer effect and manifesting, I don’t really find a clear answer to whether or not I made it all happen. Stuff happens. I was complicit in creating the future that emerged, but I was not in control of that future. There were no magic words, no incantation, that made that future happen. In that sense, I did not make it so. It may be that what I just described is simply my version of manifesting, observing a reality into existence. Some blend of random events over which I had no control and my response to those random events created a future that I did not anticipate nor even imagine before it unfolded. Looking back, I can’t imagine any future that would be more satisfying than the one that I am currently living.
The Destination is Now,
Peter
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