I wasn’t aware of how much I needed the win until after it had happened.
In most ways, my week had been going along just fine.
It paralleled the response of Vlad’s new vet, who, when they returned him from his blood tests—not his favorite—replied when I asked how Vlad behaved:
“He wasn’t the best…
And he wasn’t the worst.”
Honestly, that seems a perfectly reasonable attitude.
Moments before said tests, Vlad seems aware of what was about to happen but is still willing to comfort strangers waiting for their cat.
In any case, that was NOT the most interesting thing about the vet visit.
Until just a few months ago, before our self-defined writing retreat began, Vlad and I were happily living in Bushwick.
Over 10 years ago, Saturday Night Live satirized the neighborhood’s hipster vibe HERE as a place where artisanal mayonnaise stores were springing up around every corner.
Even in our old neighborhood, however, our vet experience might have been a bit unusual.
Yet here, in a place where we pass a sign every day reminding us that the town was founded 83 years before the United States, in 1693, it was truly extraordinary.
You see, after we checked in, I noticed that not one, not two, but THREE of the four receptionists at this veterinary hospital had neon hair, in the most vibrant shades of blue, teal, and purple imaginable.
Since they were buzzing about the office, it took me a few comical moments to put this together—mistaking the one with Aqua Hair for Cobalt Blue—until I realized they were a trio.
Appropriately, the theme I’m exploring this month is The Mirror—meditation HERE—so I couldn’t help but wonder how this came about.
Did one of them start the trend?
Was there a “single white female” deliberate mirroring thing happening…?
Or was this the aftermath of some tipsy bachelorette party dare?
A few days before, I did have a solid win.
I led a new mini-workshop, a prototype for the one I’m doing for the DailyOM’s first online global summit, that went rather well.
I’m the final speaker for DailyOM on June 8th, and you can sign up for 60% off with my affiliate link HERE.
This week’s event was a corporate wellness session with about 250 people attending.
The DailyOM’s reach is considerable (1.4 million on IG and 2 million on Facebook alone), so I’m pleased this “dress rehearsal” was a success.
I arrived online early and saw that the speaker before me was terrific.
Her topic was essentially Feng Shui for the Office Space.
I know most of you reading this are probably familiar with the term, but as a refresher, here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines Feng Shui:
“A system of laws considered to govern spatial arrangement and orientation in relation to the flow of energy (qi).”
More simply said, it’s about how the physical environment and energy mirror and amplify each other.
The “Aha Moment” for me, however, was less about rearranging furniture than realizing the clutter I actually had to deal with:
Hovering at 70,000, it was time to finally address the digital chaos of my email inbox.
Back to those receptionists with the wild hair colors…
Although she wrote it in 1961 at only 29, Jenny Joseph’s poem Warning, about her imagined future as an old woman, has had an extensive and lasting reach.
It not only inspired The Red Hat Ladies (a club for women embracing “vibrant aging”), but in a 1996 BBC poll, it was voted “the UK’s favorite post-war poem.”
Although the Veterinary staff were at best in their late 20s and early 30s, it seems they’re already on this old path.
Warning
When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple
With a red hat that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin candles, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickles for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beer nuts and things in boxes.But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.
Jenny Joseph never says it directly, but one of the boldest ways to start wearing purple might just be through your hair color.
Deciding it was finally time to address the Feng Shui disaster of my email, I launched—without quite realizing it—into a quest to reach a mysterious land I’d heard of but never experienced: Inbox Zero.
Earlier this month, I’d already begun some digital purging.
I was, however, ambling along at a pace that would have taken me more than a month to complete.
Harkening back to the theme of the Mirror—meditation again, HERE—I wrote in my journal that I didn’t want to miss that one vital email drowning in a sea of outdated or irrelevant correspondence.
Inspired by the office Feng Shui workshop, I actually did it.
Archiving perhaps 100 or so emails I saved for professional needs or sentimental reasons—with the help of an app called Mailstrom—I deleted everything else.
That night I went to sleep—for the first time ever—with a completely empty inbox.
Even though my digital path was now clear, I honestly wasn’t expecting a cosmic confirmation from the universe…but to my astonishment that’s exactly what happened.
Returning to the vet to get the refill of Vlad’s flea and tick medicine, I asked the Cobalt Blue receptionist if there was a backstory to the vibrant hairstyles.
Smiling, she insisted there was none.
I tried to probe deeper, asking if one person started the trend and the others mirrored it, but apparently they had each been hired that way.
Since the vet herself—whose own hairstyle was frankly quite nondescript—was in surgery, I wasn’t able to ask her if this was some kind of quirky employment preference or just an unusual synchronicity.
Or whether there’s a vortex of radioactive hair-dye in this sleepy colonial town.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m about to launch many things right now.
First, the new DailyOM workshop—again, you can sign up HERE and experience it live in exactly two weeks.
Beyond that, there’s a major art project and, as I shared last week, while we’re close to releasing our global wellness platform, by far my more challenging business venture is launching my mother’s Etsy store.
I’ll share it here—and everywhere—when it’s ready, but for now, it still feels premature.
To date, I’ve only posted a dozen or so items of the vast trove she has stockpiled.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, when after getting to Inbox Zero around midnight, I woke up to see an Etsy receipt from 1:38 am proclaiming my mother’s first real sale from a stranger.
Not only that, someone actually bought the most expensive thing in her shop: a vintage child-sized cane rocker—ideal for a baby’s room or nursery décor—which she’d grabbed at a church flea market for $10 (and sold last night for $350).
It’s hard not to believe there’s a kind of Field of Dreams magic to it all—”If You List It, They Will Buy!”—given the speed of the synchronicity.
It was definitely, however, an electrifying win.
In a week that—like Vlad’s behavior during his blood test—wasn’t the worst and wasn’t the best, this was exactly what I needed.
Indeed, sometimes the mirror reminds us that when we finally make room—even digitally—for what matters, what we need or want tends to show up.
Sometimes what appears is the glow of neon hair in a sleepy Connecticut town.
Or a midnight shopper in Missouri, becoming your mother’s very first customer.
Or maybe—just maybe—it’s this newsletter, reflecting back exactly what you need to remember, at exactly the right moment.
Tell A New Story. Transform Your Life
