One day in September 2011 I stopped in a grocery store.
I can't tell you what I was buying, because I never said.
This is what I told the camera about it.
I stopped in the grocery store and I realized it's everything I always wanted.
I have everything I always wanted.
And then I lost it.
And then I got back to shopping.
I forgot it.
That's the whole event, five sentences long.
Nothing in that store had changed.
My money was the same money, and I hadn't got any further with any of the things I had been worrying about that day.
Just before this on the recording I said it's all right to not feel like, boom, I love this.
It's enough to just be aware, I said, because I am love, and if I am love, then I don't need to be loved.
I said it was too good to be true, and for a moment, in a grocery store, I believed it anyway.
Later that morning, on another video, I talked about a run.
I said I went up Buena Vista, I don't know, some mountain here, or Twin Peaks, I think.
So I ran up a mountain and couldn't have told you which one.
As far as I can tell it was Twin Peaks.
I said I would love to go water skiing and rock climbing and scuba diving, and I didn't have the money for any of that, so up the hill I went.
It doesn't matter what I do, I said, it just matters that I'm being there for myself.
As I sat up on the mountain, I looked out and I said, you know what, I don't treasure this view.
I said I did at one point, and that's why I went up there and got it.
But I treasure how I feel.
Try saying that at a view.
It feels a little rude, after you climbed all that way.
I said I didn't blame myself for treasuring other things, and that it's okay too.
Then I said to whoever might watch this, I don't blame you.
And the last thing I said on that video was that I had always wondered how somebody gets this all positive conversation.
I always thought they were assholes, I said.
Keep that in mind as you read this chapter.
I do.
Ten days later I had lost it completely.
I was so scared one morning about losing a client that I saw my inner child cry, cry, cry.
I could see how much I cared about how I would feel in the future.
I had been loving everything out on the horizon and ignoring where I was, how much money was in my bank account and what I was doing that day.
So, I mean, I love my life for what it could be, not what it is.
That sounds fine until you try to get any comfort from it.
Everything I loved was so far out in the future, and so dependent on things I legitimately don't control, that nothing could comfort me.
Money was the best example.
Loving money is like a promise of something greater, I said, and when the promise comes, it's not as great as it seems.
The dream of it is better than the living of it, and that promise only leads to more promises.
If I live my life down the road, I said, I'm not really living.
I'll see myself being all those things I want to be, and I'll feel it, but my mind will be elsewhere.
I said that probably happens a lot more than I realize, when I talk to somebody and I just blow it through because I'm thinking about something else.
I got this moment, I said.
It took me a while to say it, and it was about all I had that morning.
A month before that I'd had the same idea, and I was very pleased with myself.
In August 2011 I met a woman one night, and the next day I was asking myself whether she was the one.
I said it's probably that she's not the one, because that's easier to deal with.
Then I saw that the question only came up because I was afraid it wouldn't happen.
I felt safe having seen that, and I said, oh, I'm so proud of myself, so wise.
I caught that too, because those words are one more thing you start to treasure and rely on, and I called them traps.
Then I said this.
If I had a son, I would say to him, the feelings that you have are the reward.
The feelings that you have right now are the reward.
Think about what that does to a day.
I had always treated how I feel as the price of getting to the reward.
I would feel bad now and get paid later.
I was always thinking about how this will affect my future, and clearly that takes away from living right now, because I'm worried.
We don't slow down, I said, because we fear that there's not enough time.
If the feeling is the reward, then you already have it.
You have it at your desk and you have it halfway up the hill.
You have it when it's a bad one, too, and that's the hard part.
That's where the question in this book goes to work.
How do I feel about how I feel?
A bad feeling is still yours, and you can still love it.
A few minutes after that grocery store video I turned the camera on again, and shopping came up a second time.
I said that when we go grocery shopping we're not thankful that somebody took care of us, because it's so half-hearted.
That person's helping us and we're giving them cash, and we're so not present to what we're doing.
To the extent that you're present to your emotions, I said, is the extent that you're appreciative.
I said I felt like I had just said something big, and then I took it back.
It's just the way things are, I said.
I think it's that plain.
You can't be thankful for a checkout line you aren't standing in.
If I'm off in next month, there is nobody in that store to be thankful.
A treasure is usually something you hang on to, and this one won't hold still.
Earlier that same week, around one in the morning, I said that love knows itself and therefore it hangs on to nothing.
It doesn't need to be anything, I said.
So you can't put how you feel in the bank.
It's gone by the next breath, and there's another one, and you can love that one too.
I'd say that's the only kind of treasure nobody can take off you, since you never had hold of it.
On the last night of 2011 I wanted to say 2012 was going to be my best year.
I decided to take care of my heart this year, I said.
Three weeks into that year I reported that I had slowed down, and that as I was moving slow I got to where I want to be in this moment.
The word that most reflects it, I said, is sensual.
Who I want to be is sensual.
That's a lot to announce to a camera, and I'm leaving it in.
By March it had gone down a level.
I was lying in bed and I felt myself feeling my feelings, and I loved myself feeling them, all of them.
I said that's like an onion, and it probably never ends.
It was the most centered and whole and balanced I had felt, I said, and then I corrected myself, not ever, but just easily connecting to that state.
I had learned by then to be careful what I told that camera.
In April 2012 I turned it on and said very little.
Most of that recording is quiet.
This is the best possible life I can imagine.
Including the lack of vision of others.
Including death, pain of others.
Including the moment to moment.
Love.
Loss.
I put death on that list, and loss.
I was counting them in.
Loving my life for what it could be never asked that of me, because the life out on the horizon has no loss in it.
Less than four months later, on the same camera, I said I wake up with a constant sense of fear.
So I didn't stay on the mountain.
I had already said how it goes, that morning about the grocery store.
I love it, I said, and then I forget it, and I go back to, you know, I need to worry about this and that.
Then you get back to shopping.