The things that people worry about usually break down into two broad categories: Things they can control and things they can’t. Let’s take the latter first. If you’re worried about something over which you have absolutely no control, your worrying has no purpose. If you can’t control a situation, what’s the point in worrying about it? That’s needless worry. It means you’re increasing your stress level and shortening your life for no reason. On the other hand, if you’re worried about something over which you do have control, you need to take the appropriate action to rectify what’s worrying you.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Even in situations where you seem to have no control, often there is something you can do. Take the economy, for example (I wish someone would take it – right now, it sucks). If the overall state of the economy worries you, what can you do about it? Realistically, the answer appears to be nothing, but that’s not quite true. For one thing you can exercise your right to vote and help to change the balance of power in Congress and the Senate. Better still, you can improve your own little corner of the economy. If you’re struggling financially, you can find ways to cut expenses or earn more money – get a new job or start your own business. I’m not saying the solutions will be easy, but they are real options. You don’t have to do nothing and just sit around worrying. Here are the four steps to take:

1. Identify the things that are worrying you.
2. Decide which of them are beyond your control and see if there are any small steps you can take to improve your lot within the boundaries of the bigger situation.
3. If not, accept that there’s nothing you can do, stop worrying and get on with other aspects of your life where you can influence the outcome.
4. If the worrisome situation is within your control, take whatever action is necessary to fix it.

So what has all that got to do with self belief and confidence? The answer is that you have to believe in yourself, and have faith and confidence in your ability, to take the action needed. Otherwise you’ll procrastinate and do nothing, and the source of your worry will remain intact.

So there’s another huge benefit to building confidence and belief in yourself: It greatly diminishes worry and anxiety. And that’s another reason I’ve written a book about it. The book has reached final manuscript stage and now has a title: Life Beyond Self Belief: 12 Keys to Building Unshakeable Self Belief and Rock-Solid Confidence. It will be available soon, so keep watching this space.

In the meantime, if you need to do something about the worries in your life, think about buying a copy of Say Yes to Less Stress. Just click on the book image on this page to find out more. Until the next time…

You look along the bank and see a man sitting at a desk on which sits a brass plaque bearing his name. He waves you over and says, “I’m a creek jumping expert. I can show you a foolproof method that will guarantee you can leap across that creek without falling in. Millions of people have used this method successfully and jumped fast-flowing creeks all over the world. My credentials are impeccable. I have letters after my name. I’m a DCJ, which stand for Doctor of Creek Jumping. For a modest sum of money, I’ll show you my method, which carries a money back guarantee.”

You want to get across the creek so you pay the man and he describes his method. You believe his credentials and the impressive testimonials he has from creek-jumpers all over the world, but you still can’t make the jump. Why not? Because you don’t have enough self-confidence to believe that you can make it across without falling in. So, despite having a proven, foolproof method at your disposal, you can’t continue your journey using that route.

There are men and women all over the world sitting behind desks telling you they have foolproof methods that will enable you to realize your dreams. But all the proven methods in the world will be useless to you unless you believe in yourself and have the self-confidence to act on that belief. If you’re in that situation, the only method that makes sense is one that helps you build unshakeable self-confidence and rock-solid self-belief.

And that’s why I’m working on a book about… guess what… how to build confidence and self-belief. The urge to create such a book started when I discovered that the Law of Attraction didn’t always work for me, no matter how diligently I applied methods such as those Lynn Grabhorn advocates in her wonderful book, Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting. I needed to find out why LOA was only working spasmodically and I discovered that it never worked when I lacked the self-confidence to take the next big step needed to move me toward a particular goal.

So now I believe that confidence and self-belief have to come before methods and techniques. And here’s where I get hoisted on my own analogy – the book I’m working on advocates a series of methods and techniques for acquiring confidence and self-belief. Ah, well… I never did claim to be perfect.

Watch this space.

I continue to welcome your comments on Lynn and her work, but I have to take a different direction with my own postings. I hope you’ll join me on this new journey, which will begin shortly.

Before I take a vacation from the topic of Lynn’s work, I’d like to post a comment submitted by someone signed in as MKM. I know nothing more about this contributor than his or her email, which I won’t publish without permission. I thought long and hard about publishing this contribution, because I disagree with many of the opinions expressed about Lynn and I don’t like the tone that comes across in parts of what MKM says. But I believe passionately in free speech and that anyone who writes a blog should honor that right, providing a comment isn’t overtly offensive or abusive. Here’s what MKM said, reproduced with no editing:

I had “Excuse me” foisted on me by one person after another, only to watch the reality that life isn’t all a box of chocolates but a mixture of good and bad and random chance that you have no control over mixed with what you can control slowly dawn on them (basic logic we’re all born with but which we have to intentionally manipulate by throwing money after books and seminars).

The reason Lynn Grabhorn lost her mind is simple and two fold. First, I hear the people who claim to be Christians say that it was because “demons” got her, much like Lynn herself claimed. Which is like watching the two characters from Dumb and Dumber have a duel. There aren’t any little green monsters or invisible men in the sky/shamanistic animals/blah blah nonsense. What happens psychologically to a person who convinces themselves that there are “others” manipulating them is simple – schizophrenia. Cause and effect, anyone?

Lynn’s second problem should be obvious, but then it seems when people spend this much time trying to subjugate their original common sense nothing remains simple or obvious… She wrote a book that not only had the happy go lucky manifest the happy stuff but conversely claimed that anyone who experienced anything bad was “co-creating” it and to blame. So what happened to the guru herself when bad stuff started happening to her? Where could she put the huge burden of self-inflicted blame that she had created with her highly publicized philosophy? She couldn’t slough her misfortunes off to chance or tell herself or anyone around her that she was a good person who was experiencing one of the myriad random happenstances of life. No, she had to “admit” to herself and to everyone around her that she was the biggest failure of all. Try topping off your physical illness, which is already dragging your immune system down, with that kind of mental and emotional drain – that YOU yourself created with your self “help” feel good sell more books drivel.

Please feel free to respond to this posting as you wish. MKM, I thank you for taking the time to express your views. Here are my final words on this topic for now:

I’m very happy that people are communicating through the blog and offering to help each other. Many of you have raised similar issues, so before I move off the subject of Lynn’s work for now, I thought it might be helpful to recap a few of my personal beliefs about making her philosophy work. I would urge anyone who’s serious about using what Lynn taught to consider the following:

Keep reading Excuse Me Your Life is Waiting until you’re confident that you really understand its relevance to your life and it has become like second nature to think that way.

Practice makes perfect, but if you practice diligently and Lynn’s philosophy doesn’t work, this may not be the right route for you to take.

Buy the follow up book, The Excuse Me Your Life is Waiting Playbook, in which Lynn took the concepts from Excuse Me and transformed them into a complete workbook for self-empowerment.

Don’t try to “escape” negative thoughts – it’s impossible. If someone says, “Don’t think of an elephant,” what’s the first thing you think of? If you try to block out negative thoughts that will be what you focus on. Just accept that they will arise and then use Lynn’s “flip” technique to turn them back into a positive thoughts.

Don’t eliminate any of your wants because they seem overwhelmingly large. Right now, they may be too big to achieve all at once, but that doesn’t mean you can’t work toward them one step at a time. The greatest truism ever stated is that every journey begins with the first step.

As for the last two books Lynn wrote, depicting her so-called “dark side,” I’m taking the coward’s way out. I’m just not ready to read them yet. I haven’t explored Excuse Me deeply enough to want a diversion into a new train of thought. When I’m ready, I’ll re-open this topic on the blog and be completely honest about my feelings about those final two books.

Please continue to communicate with each other about Lynn’s work and your feelings about her. I will post any comments that don’t offend. I thank you all for contributing to the dialogue about Lynn, who is someone I regard as a very important and influential author.

I wish you happiness and peace of mind.

I’m grateful for all the contributions made and I look forward to a continuing dialogue about Lynn and her books.

Best wishes to you all.

Hi John,

I read your post about Lynn Grabhorn where you mentioned that someone “out there” may know something they can share. So I decided to contact you and share what I know of her last months.

Out of curiosity I looked Lynn up on the internet. I don’t remember why I contacted her originally, but she sent me her phone number. Over a period of weeks, perhaps a couple of months, we conversed over the phone. She told me of events happening in her life, which eventually I knew threatened to take her life. I was helpless to reach out to her, because she believed that she was in touch with God (Abraham) and that His will for her was to make a heavenly home for her. She heard from Abraham daily.

I don’t believe she lost her sanity or was schizophrenic. Through my own experiences years ago, due to association through a cult religion, I believe that she was deluded by an invisible entity that was murderous in intent. At least that’s my take on the situation. He would tell her that she was having her body prepared to undergo higher vibrational shifts so that she could be a part of the new earth that was being birthed. That’s why she wrote her farewell letter in the tone that she did. She experienced horrific, violent pain on a basis that was continual and not subsiding. No doctor could tell her what it was or help her in any way. She did not have a disease, according to her. I myself experienced physical pain through interaction with invisible forces long ago; that’s why I believed her.

I tried to reason with her that no benevolent entity would put her through this. Nothing could dissuade her from her course. I knew, or at least felt, that a genuine shamanic healer could help her get rid of the entity that was torturing her. She tried to tell me that I was one of a special 100 that could join with these forces. With the help of a doctor in California who specializes in these sort of things, I myself eventually broke completely free from these influences and I knew that she could too with the right help.

I’m surprised that she lived as long as she did. I don’t think she committed suicide. I think the violent episodes eventually took their toll on her. She was never suicidal that I heard. She was just waiting for Abraham to take her and willing to endure the pain to get there. I’m sure that she felt that suicide would make her unfit for the heavenly roadmap that she was given.

Perhaps this will be helpful to you.

Sincerely Yours,
Diana Huston

Thanks, Diana, for sharing that with us and providing more insight to what happened to Lynn.

This seems to be the new Internet marketing trend – saying that the Law of Attraction –doesn’t work unless you obey other laws that are either forgotten, or secret, or recently discovered under a bed in a Tibetan monastery perched in the clouds on top of a mountain.

I’ve seen other Internet marketers who take a similar approach. I’ve heard that there are seven universal laws, of which the Law of Attraction is but one. The others are the Laws of Prosperity, Consciousness, Expansion, Expectancy, Reflection, and Cause and Effect. In reality, these so-called laws are all subsets of the Law of Attraction and they represent all the things you have to do to attract whatever you want into your life. I guess we’ll see more of this kind of stuff as Internet marketers put their own spin on the Law of Attraction in order to mine people’s fascination with it.

No matter how much I read about LOA, I always come back to Lynn Grabhorn and Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting. Lynn’s distillation of the attraction dynamic is still the one that works best for me. The key thing to remember is that LOA isn’t a wishing well. As I’ve said in previous posts, you have to put genuine passion, desire, and demonstrable intent out into the universe to trigger the Law of Attraction. And that’s what Lynn’s 30 day program helps you to do.

So my answer to the question about the economy is that people are putting out way too much fear, and too many thoughts about what they don’t want to happen as in, “I don’t want to lose my home, or my retirement savings.” Those fears are understandable in these times of media doom and gloom, sickening corporate greed, and partisan politicians using the economy as a political weapon. But as long as these negative thoughts are pouring out into the universe, the Law of Attraction will never come to the rescue of the economy. How about putting out some wants and visualizing how life will feel when they turn up? Here are just a few and I’m sure you can add to the list:

I want the president’s economic plan to work and for prosperity to return.
I want politicians to be non-partisan and help right the economy by working together.
I want house owners to stay in their homes and for the housing market to revive.
I want US car companies to recover, grow and thrive.
I want Bernie Madoff to rot in jail (sorry, couldn’t resist that one).

One of my beliefs is that you will struggle to ignite the Law of Attraction unless you’re in touch with your core person and can achieve the clarity of thought needed to be true to that inner self. That’s why I made that topic the theme of my book, UNLOCK THE REAL YOU: 12 Keys to Discovering Your True Self and Living Your Dreams.

Catch you the next time.

Dayna went on to say that the minute she does tune back in, good stuff happens fast. She also said that it’s hard to hold on to it for long, not because she feels low, but because it’s just plain hard to stay at the right level of feeling. (I hope I’ve quoted you accurately, Dayna).

I agree. I’ve experienced something similar on many occasions and it reminds me of an obvious fact that’s easy to forget: Just because we accept and believe in a particular philosophy doesn’t mean it’s easy to put it into action.

As well as providing more proof that “Excuse Me” techniques work, Dayna’s email also reminded me that Lynn’s solution to flatlining was her “flip-switch” method. In her 30 day program, she advocated writing down 30 things you like about yourself so that you can flip your attention to one of them when you get stuck in negativity. Have you ever tried writing that many good things about yourself? It’s worth taking the time to do it because, unless I’m badly mistaken, you’ll rediscover a lot of qualities you’ve been overlooking.

Richard Bachman is another author I admire. Unlike Lynn, he writes fiction. In the foreword to his novel, Messiah’s Handbook, Reminders for the Advanced Soul, he writes about a handbook that you can use to get an answer to questions that are troubling you. You simply hold your question in mind, close your eyes, open the handbook at either a left or right page, open your eyes and read the answer. One day, while he’s flying his bi-plane, he uses the book to ask why his close friend had to die a senseless death. When he looks at the book it says, “Everything in this book may be wrong.” In rage and disappointment, he tosses the book out of the aircraft into a hay field.

20 years later, a farmer’s son returns the book to him, having discovered it even though the hay field had been ploughed over many times. This time, Richard asks the book why it came back to him. It answers as follows: Every person, all the events of your life, are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.

It’s fiction, but it provides a wonderful metaphor about the part the Law of Attraction can play in our lives. To me, it’s about how our beliefs always come back when we throw them away, because we believe them deep down inside where the truth will always prevail.

In my book, Unlock The Real You, I offer a series of exercises that I call Realization Workouts. To me, developing a belief to the point where it becomes second nature is like working out – you have to do it regularly for it to do you any good. So if you believe in the Law of Attraction, you only have to keep practicing with faith and it’ll keep returning the favor. It won’t let you down.

By affirming your desire and your intent over and over again, you turn yourself into a magnet that attracts the metaphysical and material things you want in your life. This affirming process works because repetition focuses your thoughts and infuses you with the power to affect the events that occur in your life. You then attract to yourself the things that you want.

Affirmations will work better if you observe a couple of ground rules. First, you should overcome any guilt feelings you might have about asking forcefully for the things you want in life. The Universe doesn’t judge your desires, it simply applies the Law of Attraction and provides what you focus on. But you need to be careful, because this automatic, non-judgmental process can be a double edged sword. If you focus mainly on what you don’t want, even subconsciously, the Universe will bring more of that into your life. The Law of Attraction works in a negative as well as a positive way, which is why negative thinking is so damaging.

For that reason, it’s important to affirm for something, not against its opposite. For example, if you want to increase your income, don’t affirm that you want to get out of debt. That puts your focus on what you owe credit card companies and/or greedy banks. What will show up in your life is more debt, because that’s what you put your attention on.

Some people contend that you should always put your affirmations in the present tense, as if what you’re visualizing is already here. I understand that premise, but I don’t buy into it. I don’t believe the Universe recognizes the future. In the universal energy flow, everything happens in the now and there is no other dimension. The Universe will set the manifestation process in motion right here and right now whether you affirm in the present tense or the future tense. The really important thing is to affirm with passion and absolute conviction. The Universe doesn’t appear to recognize wishy-washy affirmations.

Tricky stuff, this Law of Attraction, ain’t it? And not quite as easy as we’d like it to be.

You can buy books that give you affirmations to work with, but you should always affirm what you want in your own words. It’s important to use words that feel right to you and that make you feel comfortable about what you’re saying.

Affirmations will set the attraction process in motion, but demonstrating intent will kick it into high gear. To do that, you need to take whatever action will strengthen your affirmations. Here’s a ridiculously simple example: It’s useless to affirm a windfall on the lottery if you buy only one ticket a year and sit around hoping to win that one time. Unless you buy tickets regularly, you’ll be indulging only in fantasy or a daydream and not expressing intent with sufficient emphasis.

Another useful technique is to devise affirmations with a rhythm that matches whatever exercise you’re taking. For example, if you’re walking, repeat your affirmations to the rhythm of your breathing, or in time with your stride. The same thing works for other solo forms of exercise such as jogging, cycling or swimming. Form your words, find your rhythm and feel the flow of energy.

When you use affirmations at other times, start by breathing deeply for a while and releasing any tension you have in any part of your body. Suspend any trace of doubt present in your mind. Visualize yourself living the affirmation so that you’re feeling exactly what it will be like when you the object of your desire shows up in your life. Feel it deeply and joyfully, and repeat the affirmation over and over again. Even a thousand times is not too many repetitions.

It’s advisable to begin with things that are relatively easy to manifest, or to change. When you begin to see a difference in the small things, you will build the confidence to tackle the bigger issues in your life, as you shed any fear or doubt that’s been holding you back.

So that’s the attraction process: Express your desire with passion, demonstrate intent by taking action to move you toward your goal and leave the rest to the Law of Attraction.

The only credible way to answer the question is from the point of view of personal experiences, beliefs and, perhaps most importantly of all, faith. So I will now attempt to explain my beliefs about the Law of Attraction using what can only be described as pidgin quantum physics.

The Law of Attraction works because of the expansive make up of the Universe we inhabit, but I believe that there are certain things you have to do to trigger the attraction process. I’ll get to those things in part two of this blog entry. But first, here’s an explanation of how the attraction process works that I find plausible.

Everything inside and outside of us is energy in one form or another, including the things that we see as solid. That’s why we’re connected to the energy force that moves the planets and makes the whole amazing Universe work. The speed at which any given part of that energy force vibrates, determines what kind of entity or object it will create. Speed of vibration also decides the density that the object will possess. Matter is a thicker, denser form of energy. It varies in pliability from wet clay, which is pliable, to a rock, which is dense (especially if you’re between it and a hard place). By contrast, thoughts, feelings, and emotions are finer, less dense, and more changeable forms of energy.

Within the vibrating flow of energy to which we are connected, two universal laws apply:

(1) Energies of the same quality and vibration attract each other.
(2) Manifestation of form always follows thought.

The Universe is expansive by nature, so if you connect to the energy flow with powerful thoughts about the things you want, those things will expand in your life. Conversely, if you connect with equally strong thoughts about what you don’t want, more of that will show up in your life.

This process happens because every action we take is preceded by a thought, which means that we visualize and create things in our minds before we manifest them in form. Michelangelo was widely quoted as saying that the statue of David was already inside the block of marble and all he did was to liberate it. I have no idea if the great man really said that, but it makes a terrific quote. A more plausible way of explaining this phenomenon is to say that the sculptor first saw the statue in his imaginative thoughts and then manifested it with a hammer and a chisel.

There are two emotions you have to invest in the Law of Attraction before it will work for you: Desire and intent. Just sitting around wishing for things won’t trigger the attraction process. Merely wishing for something is too feeble an act to affect the universal energy flow. Your desire for something has to be expressed with passion, ardor and intense focus. You must show intent by taking whatever action is necessary to move you toward your desires. Put more plainly, you must want something bad enough for the Law of Attraction to manifest it, and you must focus on that thing to the exclusion of all negative thoughts about what you don’t want in your life.

In part two below, I write about specific ways of connecting with the Law of Attraction.

Oprah went public in an interview and didn’t try to gloss over the shame and embarrassment she felt at being 40 pounds overweight. She admitted that she was angry with herself for allowing this to happen. Having been recently diagnosed with hypothyroidism, she could easily have hidden behind that disorder. But she didn’t. Instead, she said, “It was a fat sentence because I thought, ‘Well, now it doesn’t matter; I’ve got a thyroid problem.’”

Oprah also admitted that she had been suffering from depression without realizing it, thinking that she “couldn’t be depressed.” Like many people who struggle with their weight, she turns to food for comfort. “For me it’s not a cosmetic issue. It’s an emotional issue,” she said. “When my engine runs down, my drug of choice is food. My drug of choice used to be potato chips. Now, this year, it was organic multigrain blue chips … but a bag of them. So you eat a bag of those a day, and see what happens if you’re not working out.” She then talked about the plans she has for changing this situation and getting back to being what she describes as “her own first priority”.

There are things we can all learn from Oprah’s honesty. Although most people understand on an intellectual level that wealth and fame don’t guarantee happiness, Oprah provided us with a shining example of this. It’s easy to think, “Wow, with all her power, influence and wealth she should be happy.” But “should-be’s” don’t work that way. Oprah’s a human being just like the rest of us. All the fame and wealth in the world don’t matter a damn when you’re struggling with difficult challenges, issues or tragedies in your life.

I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that Oprah is a perfectionist and drives herself too hard in building and maintaining her media empire. The desire for perfectionism is a curse, because it makes you strive for something that ceases to exist the moment you achieve it. As soon as we achieve what we think of as perfection, human nature kicks in and we want to make it even better. So off we go again. The only things in our lives that can be described as perfect are those with which we’re already satisfied and don’t feel the need to improve.

So thanks Oprah, for reminding us what’s really important in life.

These are the kinds of issues I touch on in my book, Stop Worrying and Start Living. Striving for perfection is a contributor to stress and anxiety and I have some suggestions for overcoming this and other kinds of self-induced worry that have worked for me. You can check out this book by clicking on the link in the right hand panel of this blog. Thanks for visiting with me.

A few years ago my friend, Conni Laine, gave me a book called Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting, which has the subtitle, the astonishing power of feelings. It was written by Lynn Grabhorn. On this, the final day of the year, I woke up at around 5:00 AM feeling concerned about money. (Who isn’t these days)? When my inner worrywart shows up, I often reach for Lynn’s book. There’s something reassuring about her contention that we can manifest anything we want in our lives through the Law of Attraction. Many people have written about the LOA, which is something you either believe in or dismiss as hokum. I’ve always liked the idea and have chosen to believe in it.

Lynn Grabhorn believed that we can attract whatever we want, not by thinking about it, but by getting deep into how it would actually feel to have it. We are all a form of energy that connects us to the universe. When we experience positive feelings, we vibrate at a high frequency level, as opposed to a low frequency level which is negative. We then send out electromagnetic waves that connect with like waves of energy and come back to us. In other words, we become walking magnets. So, if we focus on what we want, instead of dwelling on what we don’t want, we’ll attract those wants into our lives. Unfortunately, it works the same way with things we don’t want.

Although I loved Lynn’s book, I had never bothered to find out anything about her life or to read anything else she’d written. I immediately began to feel better after reading the book again. So much better that I decided to go to her website and find out more about her. When I typed her URL into my browser, the site that came up surprised me. I was at LynnGrabhorn.com, but it seemed to be some kind of psychic site that provided links to lots of other websites, spiritual and non-spiritual. I checked out the site and followed links to various blogs and discovered that that Lynn had died in 2004 in her early seventies. Not only that, but there were persistent rumors that she had died through an assisted suicide.

I immediately began to research Lynn’s death, but could find very few hard facts about it. More than one blogger maintained that she had cancer and had flown to Europe, probably Holland, where Dutch doctors assisted her suicide. I was shocked and I’m ashamed to say that my first thought was that her death called her work into question. How could I share her beliefs about attracting good things into your life if she died a painful death or committed suicide? Then I dug further and found that all references to her death that emanated from Olympia, WA, where she lived, maintained that she died in her home from an unnamed illness. Another website opined that she had a painful disease that doctors couldn’t diagnose properly. Some said it showed the same symptoms as diabetes, but that she didn’t have that particular disease. Most people seem to believe it was cancer.

I also discovered that Lynn had written other books. Her first was published back in 1999 and was called Beyond the Twelve Steps, so it seems as if she may have had problems with alcohol. After Excuse Me and the Playbook that followed it, Lynn published two more books. The first was called Dear God! What’s Happening to Us? Not an encouraging title for someone impressed by her humorous, upbeat writing style in Excuse Me. Reader reviews on Amazon all agreed on one thing: This was the dark side of Lynn Grabhorn. I haven’t yet read the book, so I can’t comment objectively.

The last book was called Planet Two: Earth in a Higher Dimension…Are You Ready? Again, I haven’t read this book, but I gather that Lynn believed that heaven is actually a duplicate Earth on a higher dimension, where we get to choose exactly how we live. Neither of these two books sound like they were written by the breezy, irreverent author who wrote the book thousands of people have found so enlightening.

There have been allegations that Lynn plagiarized the work of Jerry and Esther Hicks, who have written extensively about the Law of Attraction. I choose not to see Lynn’s interpretations as plagiarism. In her introduction to the book, she openly acknowledges the Hicks’ work. She writes, “… in my own prosaic words and style I’ve reissued here the profoundly simple teachings from the Hicks family in Texas, spiced it with my own angles and buzzwords, my own observations and experiences over the past years, and blended it together with my years of study.” That doesn’t sound like a plagiarist to me.

So here’s the mystery: What happened to Lynn that made her turn to her darker side and develop beliefs that even she admitted sounded crazy? And how and where did she die? Someone out there knows the answers to those questions and I hope to hear from them one day.

Did Lynn’s death invalidate her work? In my opinion, absolutely not. On my website, you’ll find four books that I wrote with the intention of helping people to get more out of their lives. Although I believe passionately in everything I’ve written, there are times when I still struggle to apply all the content of those books to my own life. It’s like a doctor who treats patients with tobacco related illnesses, but still smokes a pack of cigarettes a day himself. Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting has helped thousands of people to imporve their lives and I believe it shouldn’t be devalued by what subsequently happened to the author. I urge you to check out this fascinating book and make up your own minds.

Going to make a quick diversion here to explain the names: Sadie came first and is the oldest by two months. Sadie is a diminutive of the name Sarah, which has Hebrew origins and means “princess.” From the moment she recovered from being abandoned in a gutter, where she was literally being eaten alive by insects, Sadie acted like a member of some obscure royal cat family, combining heart-melting affection with independent, regal aloofness. Still does.

Lola and Beckham (Becks for short) came two months later. We chose the name Lola because after her recovery, she acted with a willful independence that made Sadie seem like a wimpy, cooperative sycophant. There’s an old song that has the line, “What Lola wants, Lola gets.” Once we remembered that song, her name was a no brainer. No matter how hard we try to school her, Lola still gets what Lola wants.

Beckham is one of the most sweet-natured cats that Georgia and I have ever seen. He meanders through life at his own pace, living in his own little world. He’s not retarded, but has clearly come to the planet to live life at his own pace and be damned with these skittish rush-around, high strung females. When he wants to, Becks can take off like a cheetah at dinner time, but he soon loses interest in velocity and quietly returns to merely ambling though his own version of reality.

Here’s why we named him after David Beckham (our favorite English football player): When he first arrived in our lives we gave him a little sponge soccer ball to play with. Even though his legs were still wobbly, he immediately started dribbling the ball with both front paws. He would skillfully steer it around furniture, even when he crashed into that furniture himself. His full name soon got shortened to Becks, the barf-making diminutive of David Beckham’s full name. Ah well… we still love him. So that’s a full introduction to our kitten-cluster. Here’s what we’ve learned from them:

They live in the moment. Even when you have to tell them off for doing something loony, like trying to climb the sheer bedroom drapes using only their front claws, or circling the family room at 60 miles an hour using furniture to avoid touching the ground, they soon forget your agitation and start over with no memory of the past. And I’ve yet to see any evidence that the future features in any way in their world.

They free-flow through time as if it didn’t exist. They eat when they’re hungry, not when the clock tells them it’s lunch or dinnertime. They graze on and off all day and drink gallons of water with their food. And after eating they take some after-meal exercise playing hockey on the kitchen floor with their hard food.

They don’t get up with the sun or go to bed at night. They have what we have come to call “Frisk Time” which is a euphemism for them careening around like lunatics. And if it feels good to have Frisk Time at three in the morning, they do it. To hell with those humans who are stupidly conventional enough to think that nighttime is for sleeping. If they get sleepy during the day, they sleep. It may be for only 10 minutes, after which they stretch as only cats can, and get right on with the next piece of mischief they just dreamed up.

When they feel playful, they play. Oh my, the number of times I’ve been in boring corporate meetings and wanted to get playful; just wanting to cackle like Amadeus in the movie when people say stupid stuff; or make flatulent noises with my mouth when people shift in their seats. Yeah, I know, it’s juvenile, but no more juvenile than some of the stuff I’ve had to listen to in corporate meetings.

When they want affection they climb into your lap and make themselves totally irresistible. It’s the most blatant example of forgivable manipulation I’ve ever experienced. And just when you tear yourself away from the TV program you’re trying to watch and start petting them, they lose interest and leave.

They ignore conventional wisdom. Beds aren’t for sleeping on, they’re for cavorting on, especially at night when the humans are trying to sleep. Human bodies are for sleeping on providing they can find a comfortable spot, even if it’s the head. Their choice of napping locations around the house have made that old joke true – if you want the best seat in the house, find the cat!

Oh, yeah, and they don’t think – they just act on their instincts. No navel contemplation in kittenland. If it feels good, they just do it (these are Nike kittens, man). No risk analysis or endless agonizing about should I or should I not rappel up John’s legs with my claws out so I can grab the string on his pajama pants. No sir. It feels right so let’s do it. Whoeee. Hot damn that felt good! No thought about why John is moaning and clutching unmentionable parts of his anatomy. Live life to the full! I’ve decided to believe in reincarnation because, that way, I might get to come back as a monumentally independent cat!

I apologize to all you dog lovers and other animal owners out there. I’m sure there are just as many things to be learned from your pets. Post a comment and let me know.