THE ROPE
Those words stopped me.
The desire was placed in you for a reason. It was not planted there to mock you. It was not given to torment you with the sight of something impossible. It was placed there as a seed, as a promise, as an invitation.
- Neville Goddard
I wasn't looking for an answer that morning.
I was running short on time and needed something short to listen to while I got ready for the day. I opened YouTube and found a fourteen-minute Neville Goddard lecture.
I clicked on it because of the length, not the title. Then I heard those words. And suddenly I stopped thinking about what I'd been puzzling over for weeks and started looking at a much wider horizon. For weeks I had been asking myself why I was being drawn toward a space I had spent years avoiding. A space I had ignored. A space I had often looked at with a certain amount of contempt.
Yet there I was. Moving toward it. Not reluctantly. Deliberately. And I couldn't understand why. Then Neville answered.
The strongest example in my own life came almost twenty years ago.
In 2006 I took a two-week holiday to Australia and New Zealand. There was no grand plan behind it. Europe felt expensive. Australia seemed interesting, the exchange rate was favorable, and I had never been there before. That was enough. Melbourne. Sydney. Wellington. A simple holiday. Or so I thought.
The problem was that when I came home, Australia didn't stay in Australia.
It came back with me. I returned to my store in Palm Desert and told my Vice President that if an opportunity ever came up in Australia, I wanted it. That conversation should have ended there. It didn't. For the next two years I kept bringing it up. Quietly. Consistently. Never letting it disappear.
During those same two years I applied for other positions within Tiffany & Co. Bigger stores. More responsibility. More money. I didn't get any of them. At the time I saw those decisions as disappointments. Looking back, I see them differently. Had I received any of those positions, I would never have moved to Australia.
Eventually the opportunity arrived. And I took it.
I still remember saying goodbye to my parents. My mother was crying. She looked at me and asked a simple question.
"Why are you going?"
I paused. Then answered honestly.“I don't know. I just know that I have to." I landed in Melbourne in July of 2008. I didn't know a single person. No family. No friends. No support network. Nothing.
And yet not one day passed where I regretted the decision.
Not one.
The ten years I spent in Australia became some of the most important years of my life. Professionally. Personally. As a man.
The person who returned was not the person who left.
I have seen the same pattern repeat across my life.
An idea arrives. A question appears. A desire takes hold. And it refuses to leave. The book. The music. The work you are reading right now. Different destinations. Same rope.
I learned to read signals early. As a child it was a survival skill, watching people and circumstances more carefully than most thought necessary. Over time that practice expanded into something harder to name. A willingness to treat the unlikely as meaningful. To pay attention to the voice that answers on a Tuesday morning what I've been asking for weeks.
Years ago I stopped questioning where the signal comes from. The source is less important than the message. What landed in my head is the story.
I'm someone who pays attention to signals. Someone who recognizes patterns. And over time I have learned that when certain ideas arrive and refuse to leave, it is usually worth paying attention.
Not because they are always easy.
But because they are often pointing toward something important.
These days when I find myself asking a question, I remain open to wherever the answer might arrive from.A book. A conversation. A song. A video. A chance encounter.I take what resonates. I discard what doesn't. And I keep moving.
What struck me about Neville's words wasn't whether they were true.
It was that they illuminated a pattern I had already observed in my own life. A pattern that at sixty-eight years old I finally had language for. Maybe you have experienced something similar. A book you keep meaning to read. A place you cannot stop thinking about. A project that refuses to leave your mind. A question that keeps returning.
Maybe it's nothing.
Or maybe it's a rope tied quietly around your waist, pulling you toward a future you cannot yet see.
I don't know.
I only know that some of the best things that ever happened to me began exactly that way.
Until next time, Bill
Amor Fati
