Are You Doing What You Want With Your Life?

I’m going to recommend two books that have nothing to do with writing and everything to do with being a writer, if that’s what you want in your life. Or with figuring out what it is that you do want, if you aren’t sure — and then making it happen, which is, of course, the important part.

You might have noticed over however long you’ve been reading this weblog — or maybe you have picked up from some of my articles on the site — that I follow gut instinct in my work and life rather than a rigid plan. The times I’m most miserable, in fact, are the times when I have everything all planned out; whereas the times that I do my best work are the ones where I’m operating on intuition.

This isn’t an accident. It was the way I was brought up; I lived in a home where my mother called my father by thinking hard about him (and he answered by calling home or showing up, whichever it was that she wanted); where we moved to Alaska and Central America for spiritual rather than practical reasons after a set of circumstances that you could view as either miraculous or terrifyingly coincidental, depending on your level of inner cynicism; where we made the things that were important to us happen by writing them down. My mother stuck her important things in a Bible. I pinned mine to a corkboard. We both got what we wanted.

That’s how I went from unpublished to pro.

It works in other areas of my life, too.

If you didn’t grow up in a family that valued listening to your intuition and then acting on it, though, you may be living a life where you’re mostly just avoiding risks because risk looks frightening. You may not be living the life you really want to live.

Sonia Choquette’s family was considerably more normal than mine, but at the same time, equally as intuition-based. And she has made a career out of helping people who aren’t doing what they want with their lives move away from the circumstances that make them miserable or that stifle them, and into the lives their hearts desire. She teaches them to discover and use their intuition, and a certain amount of what I think of as Universal Law.

I own both of these books, plus almost everything else Choquette has written, plus a couple of her card decks. Her Psychic Pathway was what I was reading when I realized that I needed to do the re-inventing myself journal, and was what I was reading when I realized that I needed to be writing C. And fifteen minutes after I realized that, the money showed up that made it possible for me to do that.

These books are about more than following rote instructions to clear the clutter from your home or organize your drawers or make dull lists — these books teach you how to connect with your dreams and make them come true.