The Book of Why (7 page)

It's great to be here with you on this beautiful day. In fact, there's no place in the world I'd rather be.

All it takes is a single happy thought. Then another. Then another.

I like when it's sunny, when it rains, when it snows. I like when it gets dark early, when it stays light late. There's something beautiful about every moment of every day. All you have to do is make the decision to see the positive, to filter the world.

You need to live as if.

Let me repeat that: You need to live as if.

As if you already have everything you want. As if the universe is listening. As if it, whatever it is, is on its way.

Anticipate what's coming. Live in a perpetual state of expectation.

If you want love, expect love. If you want health, anticipate health. If you want good news, prepare for it. Celebrate whatever you want as if it's already arrived.

When you expect something, it's on its way. When you fear something, it's on its way.

All that you desire is behind a door. All you need to do is open the door and receive it.

Imagine you're trying to get from Point A to Point B. You're moving along, you're doing fine, picking up speed, you'll get there in no time, but suddenly there's an obstacle. What do most people do when an obstacle is in their way? They slow down. They go around the obstacle. Fine. But what happens when there's another obstacle, and another, and another? You have to keep slowing down, and eventually you get frustrated, you get tired, you come to expect obstacles.

Now, let me ask you all a question: Wouldn't it be better to get rid of those obstacles?

The first step in getting rid of obstacles is simple: Name them, expose them, get them out in the open.

So, take out a piece of paper and fold it in half.

On the left side of the page we're going to list the ten obstacles that keep the door of abundance closed.

Take a good look. See if you recognize any of the obstacles that have stood in your way.

Be honest. Today is a day for being real. Today is going to be one of the best days of your life. Trust me.

Now, on the right side of the page we're going to make a new list. Ten keys to keeping abundance flowing into your life.

Circle that last one, gratitude.

Underline it. Put a star next to it.

Don't ever underestimate the power of thank you. Don't complain, don't judge, don't blame, don't compare. Just say thank you. Over and over, to everything: thank you, thank you, thank you.

Some days nothing seems to be going your way. But the truth is, if you greet even those days with one thank you after another, the universe hears this. The message you're sending out is: Everything always goes my way, even when it seems like it's not. I'm going to celebrate now, because I know that it, whatever it is, is on its way. Nothing can derail me from this certainty. There are no obstacles in my way. If something seems like an obstacle, it's really not. This is what the universe hears
every
time you say thank you.

Don't sweat the details. Don't worry about how or when. Miracles aren't rational. Just know that it's on its way.

But things haven't always worked out, you say.

I know, I know.

Please, listen to me: Don't allow the weight of the past to pull you down. Don't allow your past to define your future. It's time to retell your story beginning with your next thought.

Now is all that matters; nothing else exists.

Right now I feel good about blank.

I want us to begin today by filling in that blank. Take the next ten minutes and write this sentence as many times as possible. Think of all the things you feel good about and let the universe know how grateful you are.

One happy thought, then another, then another. One thank you, then another, then another.

Right now I feel good about…

Right now I feel good about…

The universe is listening. Trust me.

I
was hearing the song everywhere; it was following me.

Late one December night, after a talk, I couldn't sleep. I got out of bed and turned on the TV. I hoped to find
It's a Wonderful Life
,
the movie I've seen more than any other. My affection for the film had to do with its idea that everything happens for a reason, that life is a meaningful chain of events. You save your brother from drowning and he becomes a war hero. Rather, your brother becomes a war hero
because
you saved him from drowning.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
. After this, therefore because of this. You hear a song because you turn on your TV at 2:22 a.m. You turn on your TV because you can't sleep. You can't sleep because you wake from a dream that your father, dead almost twenty years, is tapping on your hotel room's window. You have this dream because sleet is falling against your window and because once, when you were a boy, you made your father disappear and he never came back. You hear the last ten seconds of a song, the end of the credits of a movie, and it's enough to make you fall in love with the voice.

A few weeks later, back home, you hear a teenager at the market—a girl with dyed-red hair, a nose ring, and sad, brown eyes—singing the same song off-key. You're tempted to ask her the name of the song, the name of the singer, but don't. Instead, you trust that you'll hear the song again, that eventually it will lead you to the singer, and when that happens, you'll write about it in your next book, tell the story to audiences across the country, how you met the love of your life by expecting miracles, by trusting the power of intention and the law of attraction.

During the next few months you keep hearing the song. A man hums it as he hands you the bagel you ordered. A woman in scrubs sings the refrain between cigarette drags outside a hospital as you walk past. A woman on the subway sings a verse while you sit beside her pretending to read.

And then one February night you duck into a Chelsea bar to avoid sudden rain and lightning, and you hear the song. But this time it's her. Not a recording, but her actual voice. You see in your peripheral vision a woman onstage; she's singing a song about hello and goodbye. The lyrics are sad, but you'd never know by her happy, ethereal crooning, and her smile. It's like listening to two songs at once. You want to move closer, lean in. But you don't want to look. You're not ready for her to be anything more than a voice. Despite what you wrote in your first book, you're a little afraid each time a miracle happens.

You move closer to the stage and look. A woman seated on a stool behind a microphone, guitar on her lap. Brown curly hair, green eyes. Thin gray sweater single-buttoned over black
T-shirt,
dark jeans, thick brown belt, brown boots. You look away, and she's only the voice.

When a fight breaks out at the bar, she keeps singing. A drunk man in a suit tries to push his way to a much larger man who's laughing, arms at his sides, as if daring the other man to hit him. Unable to reach the larger man, the man in the suit throws his beer bottle, which hits someone, not his intended target, and soon a dozen people are shoving and throwing punches or trying to prevent the fight from escalating. Two bouncers with compact bodies of veined muscle aren't enough to control the crowd, and through it all she keeps singing with eyes closed. She doesn't open her eyes despite the crowd pushing its way toward the stage. The world around her could blow up and she would keep singing.

You move closer, and it seems you're the only person listening, she's singing to you alone. She opens her eyes, sees you, smiles, closes them again, and now she's not only a voice, she's a face, but not yet a name.

“Hello,” she said, and offered her hand. “I'm Cary Weiss.” She'd come to sit with me between sets, as if we'd arranged to meet beforehand.

“Hello,” I said, and we shook. “I'm Eric, but my name was almost Cary—you know, like Cary Grant.”

“That's how I spell it—with a
y
.”

“Weiss was Harry Houdini's real name, you know.”

“I didn't know.”

“Ehrich Weiss,” I said. “I was named after him.”

“Are you a magician?”

“Not really.”

“An escape artist?”

“No,” I said. “An author.”

“What do you write?”

“Books.”

“I meant what
kind
of books.”

“Actually, just one book.”

“What's it about?”

“A man keeps hearing a song, then meets the woman who sings it. I write about things like that.”

When it was time for her next set to begin, she said, “I don't think I can do it.”

“Do what?”

“Get up there and sing.”

“Why not?”

“I feel sick,” she said. “Happens every time. I keep a bucket backstage.”

“But you're great.”

“I should have been a veterinarian,” she said. “In my next life I want to come back as a vet.”

“Do you not like singing?”

“I love singing,” she said. “This happens when I'm
not
singing—when I've just finished a song, especially a song I've really nailed. I can hear the echo of my own voice, and I like it, and I think, That wasn't
me
,
that couldn't have been
me
.
”

“Are you afraid of success?”

“I don't want fame, if that's what you mean.”

“That's not what I mean.”

“I'm very happy,” she said. “My friends tell me I'm the happiest person they know.”

“Being happy is good for you,” I said. “Chapter 6 in my book.”

“Oh,” she said. “So you write self-help books.”

“Book,” I said. “Singular.”

“What's your book called?”

“
Everyday Miracles
.
”

“I like that,” she said. “Will there be a sequel? I mean, is it part of an epic trilogy or something?”

“I'm not a novelist.”

“Seriously, I'm going to get your book.”

“Sure, but will you read it?”

“Of course,” she said. “I'll even write you a fan letter.”

She lived in a high-ceilinged two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn; she used one bedroom as a studio, where she wrote songs. Running around the apartment, chewing newspapers, table legs, my shoelaces, anything in her path, was a German shepherd puppy, a female named Ralph. Huge ears, needle teeth.

A warm night for March, so we ate our first dinner together in a narrow, brick courtyard Cary shared with two other tenants. Rainwater from an early-evening shower dripped from the fire escape into my wineglass. We sat in silence—not at all an uncomfortable silence—waiting for each drop. I thought we might spend the entire night this way, and that would have been fine.
Drip
,
a long pause,
drip
,
a longer pause,
drip
,
an even longer pause, the red wine at the bottom of my glass a shade lighter.

After dinner we played with Ralph. We threw a tennis ball for her to fetch, hid training treats in our pockets and made her sniff them out, played hide-and-seek, Cary in one closet, me in another, then both of us in the same closet, quiet in the dark, the smell on her breath of the cherries we'd had for dessert, her finger on my lips to tell me to stay quiet, Ralph scratching the door, crying for us to open.

When we opened the door, she jumped on us, licked my hands, latched on to Cary's jeans, and pulled. We ran through the apartment until the downstairs neighbor banged on his ceiling, then we looked at the clock and saw that it was late.

That was the year of hello. The song, the bar, an exchange of names, our first date, our engagement six months later.

It's a cliché to say that some couples just know, but we did. There was no drama, no doubt, no complications having to do with career or geography or religion, no recent messy breakups not yet fully cleaned up. It's also a cliché to say that we felt as if we'd always known each other, so let me revise that one: it felt like every date, every dinner, every movie, every kiss, every night we slept beside each other had already happened, as if we were living lives already lived. We joked about this almost constant déjà vu, the surprise—a good one—we felt every time we had that strange feeling that we'd done all this before, that we were characters in a story already written, one we'd read a very long time ago but had forgotten.

At the end of every year we made a list. Seven years, seven lists. A way of naming the recent past; practice in short-term memory. There was the year we bought the house in Chilmark, where I now live alone. There was the year my second book was published, the year one of Cary's songs was used in a sweater commercial, the year I shaved my beard and immediately grew it back because I didn't like to see my own face. There was the year we watched every Woody Allen movie, the year I started running, the year we made our own bread. There was the year the towers fell, of course, a difficult year for entirely different reasons. There was the next year, the year of color codes for fear, but for us there were no codes, just fear, and ours had nothing to do with planes flying into buildings or anthrax or smart bombs—our fear, I should say mine, was a much more personal, a much more selfish fear.

After the year of hello was the year of silent Saturdays. Our first year of marriage—one of my favorites.

No talking. Just gestures and facial expressions and touch to know what the other wanted, what the other was feeling. There were gifts in silence: to put my finger to her lips to say
hungry
,
to have to touch more, to make love without words and to lie, after, with only the sound of our breathing. Every Saturday
every
year until the last, when I didn't
not
want to hear her voice, didn't want her
not
to hear mine.

The last year, I couldn't not speak. It was
too
quiet. I would panic, would forget she was in the bedroom, would call out to her, and she would walk into the living room, her finger to her lips to say,
Silent day, did you forget?
and I would say, “I don't want to do it anymore,” and she would mouth,
Are you sure?
and I would say, “Say something, anything—it doesn't matter.” Then she would sing to me—not words, just sounds, humming—and that way I could hear her voice, but she could still say that she hadn't spoken.