So, you want to be the most amazing person ever. The good news is that, through the power of positive thinking, you can have anything* you want, as long as you know the secret.

What is the secret?

Well, it wouldn’t be much of a secret if I didn’t drag this unnecessarily hyperbolic exposition out for as long as humanly possible only to tell you something ludicrously obvious at the end, would it? In order for the secret to actually work, you’ll need to tolerate a lot of extraneous narrative that leads you to the very narrow conclusions I, the author, want you to “discover” for yourself. So, how am I going to do that? Easy. We start at the beginning…

The Problem

You’re stuck in a rut. You’re spinning your wheels. You can’t get a grip? You’re running out of gas? Running on empty? Any other car related metaphors I might have missed?

We eventually all get there. (Don’t worry teenagers, you’ll get you chance.) We hit a wall and feel like we’re going nowhere, especially during a pandemic with everything shut down. Now we’re working at home, dealing with the kids 24/7, finding it difficult to focus, missing deadlines, or just knocking off altogether. It’s especially difficult if, like me, you are old and don’t work.

As a (not) celebrated author, I’ve had my share of slumps. You would too over twenty years and a hundred books. Now that that industry is dead, I’ve moved on to… other engagements. I worked in IT for a number of years, my wife and I consulted for many years, I worked with a few firms in and around LA, and I sold my interesting skill set to anyone who would spare $25 an hour after the Great Recession.

Now, at 52, after five years of soul-crushing rideshare driving. now in the middle of a global pandemic, at the (hopefully) end of the reign of an American Idiot, at the top of a new year that’s starting off with a bang, after what was already the Year from Hell, I’m on… sabbatical.

And on that sabbatical, I’m trying to write. I have the perfect project that has the potential to go on for years, but I’m having trouble getting started. It all feels way too big and I can’t settle on an organization tool and there are too many new videos to catch up with on YouTube and whatever else bullshit excuse I can concoct to distract me from getting started. I’ve got the domain and the website and everything ready to go, I just need to write the content.

So, since I was too lazy to do that, I came up with a plan to fix it, and this is it.

Step 1: Personal Assessment

The first step in any self-improvement process is to assess yourself. Let’s take a quick little test. For every “YES” answer below give yourself one point. Let’s see how many points you have at the end and what that means?

1. Give yourself a point if you are breathing.
2. Give yourself a point if you have a pulse.
3. Give yourself a point if you know or can determine the time and date.
4. Give yourself a point if you can move one or more of your limbs.
5. Give yourself a point if you can see, touch, or smell anything on or around you.
6. Give yourself a point if you are reading this.
7. Give yourself a point for every language you can use to communicate with others.
8. Give yourself a point for taking this quiz.

So, what did your total come to? Check the chart to see your starting point:

Now, things start to get exciting as we get a sense of who you are going to be as you advance through the program. Don’t get too excited, though, as this first result is merely a baseline; the starting line that will help you form the foundation of your exciting new life.

Step 2: Recognizing Your Talents

Now that you’ve established that you are, at the very least, a human being, you can move on to Step 2 where we’ll work on identifying the skills you already possess. These skills, once recognized, will be crucial elements on your path to discovering the secret, which you can then apply in your life to achieve unknowable results.**

Isn’t it thrilling to be unaware of what the future holds?

What skills, then, will you bring to the table? How will you participate in daily human life? How will you contribute? Select at least two skills from the following list of common traits that best apply to you:

• You can see/touch/smell/taste at least one thing on or around your body.
• You can move from one place to another within a frame of time.
• If you make an audible noise around other people, some of them may react.
• At various times during any given day, you consume food and/or fluids…
• …and your body takes in nutrients and ejects waste as needed.
• You are aware of your self and acknowledge it in this space and time.

You may be surprised to discover that all of these traits are all found in amazing people. You might also be surprised to find that you relate to all the listed traits. That’s normal and merely indicates that you are well on your way to mastering being an amazing person! Better yet, it indicates that you are well equipped for your journey

Chance favors the prepared mind.

- Louis Pasteur

Step 3: Finding Your Center

This will be the least concrete segment of the overall process. You can’t just point to it, your center. It doesn’t exist in physical space. It’s the one thing that makes you the happiest, whether you’re able to do it now or ever have before. It’s the fulfillment of who you believe you are in and of that moment.

Have no fears. This isn’t permanent.

Dreams can change, and yours likely will over your lifetime. Though some settle into their dreams rather easily and with little fuss, most of us have the wrestle around a bit to find a good fit. The good news is that this can happen at any age AND you’re already on your way towards becoming an amazing person, so…

1. Look deep inside yourself.
2. Find that one thing that makes you the most happy.
3. Focus on it until it becomes clear.
4. Do it.

That’s right…

Step 4: Do It

Yes. There’s nothing more. Just do it. Do the thing you love. Now, I grant that, during a pandemic, not everyone will be able to just do whatever it is they love. I get that. In those cases, do the first thing you love that won’t get someone else killed.

Once you’re satisfied that you’ve done that thing you love to the greatest extent possible, move on to the next dream. In fact, keep coming up with new dreams. There’s nothing and nobody stopping you. And, one fantastic feature is that you aren’t limited in any way on how you can make your dreams come true.

That’s right! YOU decide when and where your dreams come true. Funny that.

Just be mindful that, somewhere nearby, someone else is making their dreams come true. The last thing you’d want is some asshole barging in on your dream. Why do the same to someone else? And who knows, maybe your dream involves helping someone else with their dream. This would be an awesome opportunity to house two birds with one nest.

What qualifies as a dream? Anything, really. How many things make you happy? I can think of quite a few, but only one gives me ultimate joy; bringing joy to a reader through the written word. You could build a bookshelf. Write some letters to people who are important to you. Craft a new business plan. Fly a radio controller airplane. Sew masks for your family, neighbors, and friends. Feed hungry families. Sleep in a hammock. Hang your fresh laundry out to dry on a breezy Fall afternoon. Can some peaches. Gild a lily. Knit a sweater. Write a rock song. Battle some orcs. Tie ribbons on porcelain dolls. Hunt for old video game gear at local thrift shops. Paint religious scenes on match heads. Go fishing. Lobby for human rights. Arrange flowers. Re-pack the read-end on an old Ford truck. I don’t know. You’d know better than I.

Seriously. It’s not rocket science.

Step 5: What Happened To Becoming Amazing?

If, and I stress IF, you followed the steps precisely, you will have already transformed yourself into an amazing person. You’ll know when. If you haven’t done anything yet and skipped ahead, you’ll only find the disappointment of the reality that there is no simple solution to this problem.

It’s not someone else’s problem to fix. This is all on you.

Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t have help or support from anyone. Happiness isn’t a solo endeavor, it’s a team sport. Humans thrive best in social climes. So, yes, it’s on our shoulders to work on our problems, but we’re not alone. We can leverage any resources necessary (and legal) to achieve happiness. Hell, it’s even enshrined in the Constitution of The United States of America as a key human pursuit.

In the end, whoever you are most comfortable being is the most amazing you there is, and you should strive to be that you as much as possible. And the easiest way to do that, is to do you.

That’s all anyone should ever ask of you. Everything else is gravy.

Oh, and the secret is you.

* by “anything” I mean anything (i.e., factor, value, trait, etc…) you already have but don’t yet acknowledge in yourself.

** Unknowable results, by there very nature, are unknowable. Therefore, we cannot predict the outcomes of any efforts to find your amazing self. We do, however, know that, in the end, you’ll be an amazing person! You already ARE!!

My sister summed it up best.

“I haven’t seen him in so long, he’s already been dead to me,” she said, or something like it. You get the point.

I was watching a video on YouTube about the new Anbernic RG351M when it paused itself. Then my phone rang. I could see it was my sister from the image that appeared on the display. I knew at that moment that she was calling me to tell me dad had died. She had texted me the day before letting me know that he was in hospice at home.

This was a marked change from years past. When my older sister died in the early 2000’s, I learned two weeks later, by letter from my father. Years later, when my mother had moved back to Southern California from Knoxville and would subsequently die of dementia, I was told about that a week late. When I figured out that my father had a degenerative brain disease and was likely going to die from it, I figured the same would happen when he did.

You see, our step-mother has been keeping us away from our father. Why, I couldn’t tell you. My sister and I agree that they likely planned it together, but I’d need more information before I were to make an educated judgement. There are loopholes in some of the timing elements that I’ll need to look into.

This, however, should illustrate the issue. I’m not sad my father has passed. No, I’m more concerned about the apparent shady behavior of our step-mother. Like my sister said, it’s like he’s been dead, but it’s taken everyone else a few years to figure out.

We expected it.

Like I knew that seeing my sister on my caller ID meant that he had passed. Like knowing my mother’s dementia would lead to her eventual death. This got me reflecting on familial relationships.

In a letter I wrote to our step-mother over Christmas, I likened our family to a diaspora of micro families that don’t frequently interact with each other, and when we do, it’s all through a veneer of casual, apathetic complacency. Happy enough with things to not be concerned about anything in particular. Pleasantries passed about like business cards.

This is no way for a family to act, so I’ve decided that I’m going to reconnect with my sister and her family and our terminally acidic brother. And maybe even our estranged brother-in-law, our older sister’s widow. My sister has already agreed, which makes me endlessly happy, but I have yet to speak to either of my brothers. I believe they will be saltier to deal with, but I shall make the effort.

I have lots of issues to deal with, personally, within my family, and among my distributed family, that I think it’s far better to at least work on positive communications with your family, despite the hard pasts. It’s so much better to work together as a team, leveraging our strengths and forgiving the weaknesses in ourselves and others, to achieve a goal. But it seems so very hard to muster the courage to work with some people. I’ll remind you of this, though:

We’ve all got our demons.

We could compare scars all day long, but in the end our pains our ours alone and we can neither share nor compare them with others. These burdens are ours to bear, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together to share the load across many shoulders.

It’s never an easy row to hoe, change. Think of the metaphor. Dirt. On the top, it’s old and crusty and drained of nutrients. Underneath, however, the sustenance-rich, moist, life-giving soil has been spending years growing on the food of the past, and is now getting churned into the crusty, old topsoil, blending the two into an amalgam of old and new, each fighting for prominence. The old, running out of resources, desperately clutching at authority for validation, to keep mattering.

But they do matter. They need to move into teaching roles to feed the new soil being readied for the next tilling, and so on, and so forth… As each season fades into glorious reds and oranges before falling to the ground to feed the soil that feeds the tree that feeds so many, making room for the new leaves to stretch out and reach for the Sun.

My father fought for that ideal in Apartheid South Africa alongside Bishop Desmond Tutu. He fought for the souls of human beings to be recognized as such, in a society where racial segregation and hatred had become indoctrinated into law. With the help of many others, my father did his part to bring about freedom in South Africa.

You’d think that kind of deep human empathy would translate to a loving home life, but you’d be wrong. It wasn’t ripped from the pages of a horror anthology. It was my otherization because I was adopted. Likewise, it was dad focusing on my fuckups more than he focused on his blood children’s authentic issues.

He wasn’t a dad as much as he was an event.

But I’m not here to denigrate my father. I know that he loved us all, and we loved him. When I asked to go to Disneyland for my birthday every year, we went. I wasn’t abused, at least not in obvious ways. I was, however, sent off to boarding schools, anything to keep my away from home and out of anyone’s hair. At the age of nine, after truly learning that I was adopted from my mother, that growing sense of abandonment continued to swell inside me.

The sense compounded after, upon evaluating my life at the nexus of my eighteenth birthday, I counted that I had been sent to no less than nine different schools since kindergarten. There’s no question I was a difficult child. I won’t apologize for that. Those were times past that I can no longer rectify directly. That work must be done retroactively.

But it’s still hard knowing that, as a child, you had appointments to meet with your father in his office.

There’s an emotional distancing to that. It sticks with me, that I dealt with dad’s secretary almost as much as I did him directly. But there’s something that hurts far more, and it didn’t have to happen this way. Choices were made, and we have to abide by them for now, but I make no guarantees that I won’t go after them in the near future. What is it that I’m talking about?

That my step-mother wouldn’t let me see my father before he died.

That, I’ll never forgive. Or forget.

In the meantime, however, I think I’ll get to writing that which I should have been writing for a very long time.

The clattering melody the train wheels sang under my feet was hypnotic. It beat a staccato rhythm against the rails, countering the smooth, blur outside the double-pane window upon which I rested my right temple. The car swayed; gently, then roughly, and gently again. Several tons of steel, aluminum, plastic, wood, and fabric played a cacophonous symphony as it hurtled down the misty California coastline. I watched without seeing, my vision blurred as my mind juggled thoughts of indecision and mortality.

“Is anyone sitting here,” said a voice over my left shoulder. I sat alone in a set of four seats arranged to face each other.

“No,” I responded, leaving my head on the chilly glass.

“Indeed,” said the voice.

Santa Barbara was fading away behind me, but the little city couldn’t have remained clearer in the theater of my mind. The events of the last week were still fresh, an open wound of shock, resignation, and pent up emotion let loose in a resultant torrent of rage.

I got the news Tuesday morning as I drove to work through Santa Ana. The traffic was worse than usual, an accident a few miles away having caused ripples of congestion to spread out like concentric wavelets on the surface of a pond.

My father had been found dead in his Ojai home.

The scuttlebutt was homicide, as if that were even possible. The idea was so absurd I couldn’t stop turning it over and over, examining every possible angle. I called work and told them I wasn’t coming in, that there was a sickness in the family, and I would be gone for, at least, a few days. My boss wished me and my family well, and I turned around to head North. You can, after all, go home again, but nothing will be the same.

I guess that was the point.

The trip up the coast was punctuated by whipping rain and tearing gusts pouring from dull, grey skies, feeling very much like my mood had been extracted and hoisted up for all to see. I rented a car in Santa Barbara and drove up to Ojai, checked in at a hotel, and made my way to the house. My father’s body had already been moved, and there was some kid in a police uniform minding the front door, trying to look authoritative.

That… familiar voice came out of the fog.

“A penny for your thoughts,” it said.

“That’s my line,” I quipped, and looked around.

That was the first time that turning my head would be an event unto itself. I stared across the gap between the seats to peer into eyes as pale blue as my own, but older, worn, beaten, but oddly content. The elderly man smiled at me; his left front incisor cocked at an odd angle. He stroked his sparse, closely cropped beard and chuckled.

“Pay no mind to me. I just saw you so deep in thought you might want some help back up for some air,” he said in a comfortable baritone.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” I lied. “I’m just thinking about something.”

“Yeah.” He said. I sighed and turned to look at the endless shoreline passing by.

“Rough times,” he said, almost too quietly to hear.

I had just gotten out of the rental when an unmarked detective car rolled up to the curb. The doors popped open and two large men in neatly tidy suits climbed out, making the Crown Victoria look like a clown car. The passenger took two enormous, though oddly lazy, strides towards me and extended his hand.

“Mr. Kerr.” It was a statement of fact.

“Yes,” I replied.

“I am sorry for your loss.” Another statement of fact.

“Thank you,” I responded. I shook his hand or, to be accurate, he enveloped mine and then waggled it around.

“Mr. Kerr,” stated the other man, “I’m Detective Hatch. This is Detective Stokes.” Hatch put his hand in his pocket and pulled out what looked like a Zippo lighter. It was his smart phone. A smirk crossed my face.

“Your father was found at 5AM Tuesday morning. I was the one who called you. I can’t give you any details about the crime, but I can tell you that it was clear that he was killed,” announced Hatch. Stokes nodded in agreement, clutching his hands behind his back at what appeared to be parade rest.

It didn’t really click into place. They were just words, spoken at me by a pair of monotonic yetis in dark suits. My mother had passed away four years prior of lung cancer. She was a prodigious smoker. My father had never smoked. He had been retired for more than a decade but had never stopped being a minister to his congregation.

“Wow,” was all I could say.

The train started to slow, its rhythm slowing in pace and insistence. We were stopping at Union Station in downtown LA where I would change over to a Metro train to take me back to Mission Viejo. The marine layer was thick, but it wasn’t raining. The man sitting across from me was looking across the car. I could see he was a little thinning, his hair a rumpled mess of brown and grey.

“What did you mean,” I asked his neck. He slowly turned, that gentle, crooked smile on his lips.

“By what,” he queried.

“You said ‘rough times’ just now,” I reminded him.

“Oh, that.”

“Yeah.”

“You had this look in your eyes that spoke of a deep pain,” he said, his gaze calm and friendly. He smiled a little less.

“If only that weren’t true,” I said. I felt the anguish start to bubble in my gut and a flush come to my face.

“I’ve seen some ugly things,” he said.

I sat there, saying nothing. The train was moving into the yard. In a few minutes, everyone would be getting up to get off the train and find their happiness or sadness or nothing at all.

“There was once a time in my life that I had no idea what to do. I had faced a terrible demon and fought it for years,” he said, almost wistfully.

“What happened,” I asked.

“I won.” The smile came back. I looked into those eyes and I saw that there was peace.

The train came to a stop and dozens of people stood, fetching parcels and luggage from the overhead racks. I started to stand, but the man placed his hand on mine and leaned in.

“I know you’ll win, too,” he said, winking.

He stood, wheeled around, and followed the crowd out of the train car. After a few minutes, I stood up, wondering what just happened. I grabbed my bag, and swung down out of the train, sucking at the the little notch in my front tooth.

Photo by Stefan Stefancik from Pexels