EMBRACE THE HAT

My 20th cousin, 5 times removed

She wears hats very well.

(Queen Elizabeth II of England)

I have a wonderful neighbor with a very loving disposition, who is a follower of a philosophy I call "cosmic poo poo." Whenever I let slip the words, "when I lose my vision entirely" or something to that effect, she jumps right on me. She believes (and many do) that people create the world with their minds. While I agree that the attitude with which you respond to events can have a bearing on how it turns out, I don't believe in the simplistic causal relationship between my mind and everything that swirls around me. I LOVE life, I have many artistic and creative projects in the hopper, and I fully intend never to die, for instance, but I have a feeling that, no matter how consistently I affirm that idea, I will die one day.

In my personal approach to life, I recognize that the world does not revolve around me. There are other people and groups of people and systems of operation, and corporations that also have intentions that produce effects upon us all. Humans rub up against one another and act upon one another and cause things to happen to and around one another that may not be what the recipient imagined for themselves.

Designer Carolina Herrera's hat 

Fall season, 2010

My version of "having a positive attitude" requires me to be plastic, flexible and a bit bouncy in my response to stressors. My aim is to greet them with as much of a happy attitude as possible because, no matter how many times I might click my enchanted shoes together and repeat some voo doo formula, my problems do not magically disappear - which is not to say that I do not believe in miracles. I most certainly DO believe in miracles, but I know that miracles are caused by the will of God and not my own mind.

Obviously, I am not speaking from the vantage point of the higher reaches of unitive thought in which I am one with my God, but I would just remind you that one only reaches such oneness by abandoning the individuality that would keep one apart from deity to begin with - so it is STILL the Lord who wills the miracle into being, and not ourselves. To claim that "I" can will the world to obey me is obviously a false claim - which is why I call this idea "the cosmic poo-poo."

Just click your heels together and say:

"There's no place like home - There's no place like home..."

I have noticed that many people who are convinced that the cosmic poo-poo philosophy has worked for them are usually those people who have egos that refuse to acknowledge the help they've received from outside themselves. Often, they have hidden or ignored resources in the form of other people, such as devoted family members, or they have been in the right place at the right time to be the recipient of the world's largesse. Donald Trump's father gave him $400 MILLION dollars to start himself out in life, and, because Trump knows he did not earn his wealthy status, he has spent his entire life in a pathetic string of self-promotions, even going so far as to create phony magazine covers that he blew up and installed on the walls of his business property. He never credits his father for his wealth.

The fact is that while most people work very hard in their lives, not everyone "pulls themselves up by their bootstraps" to become a millionaire or a best-selling widget maker or a musician or...whatever. It simply is not possible for everyone to get there, through hard work or "positive thinking" (cosmic poo-poo.) My position is that you probably can't succeed without confidence and hard work but very few people in possession of those attributes actually find that it works for them in the ultimate sense, absent other factors. People who work very hard, whose jobs involve physical labor, like cleaning houses, for instance, can work 60 hours a week and never take a day off and will never, ever become millionaires. I was a legal secretary for many years, and a very good one - but the only person who got rich was my boss, who had a house in Beverly Hills, while I could barely afford a run-down apartment in Hollywood.

Given all this, when the doctors told me a few years ago, that I have macular degeneration that will gradually destroy my vision, and that it is important to eat the Mediterranean diet, take the scientifically tested vitamins, and protect my eyes from the sun by wearing hats and sunglasses every day whenever I go outside, I followed all of these prescriptions. I didn't sit down and start reciting spellbinding formulas like, "my vision is perfect" or whatever the cosmic poo-poo people say I should do in order to manipulate the world.

I can't say that my prayer life changed at all either because my attention is typically with God all the time, as a matter of course. The thing that is most important to me is to be immersed in God consciousness and to trust That. But I am not an automaton. I have human fears and apprehensions because I am still rather attached to this wonderful world, but I am working on releasing undue attachment, rather than expending useless energy trying to will the world to accommodate me.

One the other hand, we would not be here, in this world, if it had no value. The Lord has put us here for some reason and, I am sorry but no one really knows what the reason is, so we have to trust that "something good is going on," as the swami once said, and proceed accordingly.

Instead of greeting the necessity of wearing hats as a sad reminder of a frightening prognosis or a descent into unfashionable "old lady" territory, I embrace it and turn it into something fun. I have several hats in different colors that I regularly decorate with beaded bands that I make, or inexpensive sparkly little pins. I admit it isn't "nunnish" but I have no uniform to which I must conform, and no superior to whom I will answer for my silly hats. If my prescription eyewear wasn't so darn expensive, I might resort to some outlandish style with those as well. Perhaps, in that case, it is best that I am too poor for it.

I don't think many people in my town wear hats - so wearing any hat at all makes me an object of attention, which I typically do not want. As I write this, I am trying to remember seeing anyone wearing a hat in the last 20 years, and I can only think of one person who wears an actual hat with a  proper brim, and that was one of my neighbors who works in the entertainment industry. I can't even recall seeing anyone wearing a baseball cap, though I am sure there must be a segment of the population who wears them to sporting events. Oddly enough, there IS a man's hat shop here in town, so there must be some call for it. Perhaps the gentlemen are saving their hats for when they ride into Santa Fe. Who knows?

Here, we see that we can mix two interests in one:

fashionable hats and gardening.

Obviously, I am going rather far afield to make an elementary point. The world does not revolve around each one of us. It simply can't, and it isn't meant to. Our much vaunted "American individuality" gives the mistaken idea to many of us that we are in charge of more than what is within our bailiwick. We are not in charge of what others do to us. We are only in charge of what we actively do and how we greet what happens to us. I recommend that we not only "accept" our bad fortune, but find a way to also embrace it and celebrate some part of it, if we can.

Now, I must close because I have a cane waiting for me to decorate.

God bless us all

Silver Rose
Sannyasini Kaliprana