Embrace the Mystery!
Funny thing about Step #10 in my new book, The Way of the Fool: How to Stop Worrying About Life and Start Living It...in 12½ Super-Simple Steps. Step #10, like the title of this post, is "Embrace the Mystery." The funny thing? The Way of the Fool was the first of my 16 books to not demand that I "embrace the mystery" while writing it.
You see, with all my other books I began writing with only the vaguest sense of what they would be about. Sometimes, all I knew was the title; sometimes, not even that. I neither planned nor outlined, and with my fiction, I never plotted.
The Way of the Fool was different. The idea for the book came to me nearly fully formed: I knew the title, I knew how the book would be structured and I had a pretty clear sense of the content.
With The Way of the Fool there was no mystery to embrace, to surrender to or to unravel. Sure, there were things I discovered along the way...like that 12½th step! But knowing so much so clearly at the outset was probably why the book wrote itself in record time: precisely 10 weeks from the moment of conception to the day of publication. Compare that with The StarQuest, my second novel, which took 11 years and two false starts before I was able to finish a first draft!
Yet even I if was spared Step #10 while writing the book, I have been called to "embrace the mystery" countless times in my life. (I recount one of them in the book.) I have also lived each of The Way of the Fool's other 11½ steps multiple times over the years. Hell, I've lived all 12½ of them this week, including #10!
Of course, The Way of the Fool is more than a series of steps. It includes affirmations, meditations, journaling exercises and stories (mine and others') that illustrate each of the steps in action, as well as grounded, practical inspiration, like the following excerpt adapted from the "Embrace the Mystery" chapter...
Step #10: Embrace the Mystery
It’s human nature to want to understand, to want to figure out, to want to know. Some of our greatest scientific discoveries have come from that innate curiosity about how the world works.
Yet there is a difference between “wanting to know,” which derives from a healthy spirit of inquiry, and “needing to know,” which too often demonstrates a lack of trust.
When we are fixated on a “need” to know, what we are truly doing is craving control. “If I know what’s going on and why it’s going on, everything will make sense, I will be in control and I will be safe.”
Yet some of our most transformative advances and profound breakthroughs have occurred when an absolute need for certainty is abandoned in favor of the freedom of open-ended exploration...when we turn away from the common sense of the well-trodden path and step into the uncommon wisdom of the road less traveled...when we stop asking “why” (and insist on an answer that makes sense) and start asking “what if”?
What if we could stop insisting that our world make sense to our logical minds?
What if we could surrender instead to “heart sense”?
What if we could give up the need to know without losing our natural inquisitiveness?
What if we could abandon control? What if, like the Fool, we could leap in faith?
What if?
In her Amazon review of The Way of the Fool, Unity Santa Fe's Brendalyn Batchelor declared that The Way of the Fool "will transform your life." Find out how: Get The Way of the Fool today and start kicking your stress to the curb!
In paperback or ebook from major online booksellers or signed by me to you from the books page on this website.