by Mitch Horowitz
In the first decade of this century, I spent several years within a spiritual group dedicated to the ideas of Russian philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff. I was under the guidance of a remarkable and very gifted teacher – a gruff, lovable man of razor-sharp intellect. He demanded the most from everyone around him, though no one so much as himself. He used to delight in giving my colleagues and me impossible
tasks to perform. At every turn, we found our mettle tested and our limits stretched.
One time in preparation for a winter camping trip, he instructed me to purchase some plastic buckets, for a choice purpose: to serve as chamber pots for those female campers who didn’t want to venture outside of their tents into the icy woods at night. The buckets, he directed me, with glee, must be heart-shaped and colored pink. Or, as a second-best option, he allowed, they could be red. I began searching – visiting hardware and bed-bath stores in New York City. No pink buckets could be found, and certainly no heart-shaped ones.
I made calls, and checked still more stores. Aside from receiving some odd looks, I turned up nothing. I fell back on looking for red plastic buckets, of an ordinary shape – not too difficult a task, it seemed. But, once more, in the commercial capital of the nation, no one seemed to have red plastic buckets for sale. By this point my wife was losing patience with me. Why, she wondered, didn’t I show the same zeal for ordinary household projects as I did for this task? After more days of searching, it was final: I could find no pink, no red, and certainly no heart-shaped buckets. I would have to call up my teacher and say, I tried, but I failed.
This phone call was on my mind just before I embarked on an errand at a small neighborhood grocery store near my home on Manhattan’s East Side. I stood outside the store with my cell phone in my hand, but something told me: just wait, don’t make the call right now. I went inside the store and walked straight to the back, to the cold-foods section. And there, at the rear of this modest, around-the-corner store, stood a pile of fresh, shiny plastic buckets – not only pink but also heart-shaped. I couldn’t believe it. I stopped a stock boy and asked, What color are those buckets?
Fixing me with the nut-of-the-day look, he replied: Pink. They had just arrived in, he said.
I cannot assert that my tireless search somehow manifested the yearned-for buckets. But nor can I call the situation ordinary. It’s the kind of incident that a person has to be involved in, with some skin in the game: a situation in which you endeavor past all conventional effort, to the point where giving up seems like the only reasonable option, and the experience of then suddenly accomplishing an aim, or in this case finding an unlikely item in the unlikeliest of places, carries an emotional charge that no actuarial table can fully capture.
Statistics are wonderful for measuring odds, but not for measuring the emotional gravity that one attaches to them. It can be argued that emotions are incidental to odds. But not entirely. An event is notable not solely for its odds (and these odds were slim) but for the quality of the event’s meaning given the expectations and needs of the individual. And at such times, an act of positive persistence seems to net a result that goes beyond ordinary cause and effect: something additional seems to occur. Exceptional commitment appears to summon an exceptional factor, neither fully expected nor describable.
It is also possible to observe a contrary case – in which panic, impatience, or anxiety conspires to overturn all reasonable, positive odds, and foments a negative outcome. I purposely used a simple example above not to highlight life’s most dramatic stakes but to illustrate something about the nature of an outlook within the confines of everyday life.
The above article is an excerpt from the new book One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life by Mitch Horowitz. It is printed here with permission. Mitch Horowitz is vice president and editor in chief at Tarcher/Penguin, the division of Penguin USA dedicated to metaphysical literature. He is the author of Occult America (Bantam), which received the 2010 PEN Oakland/ Josephine Miles Award for literary excellence. Horowitz frequently writes about and discusses alternative spirituality in the national media, including CBS Sunday Morning, Dateline NBC, All Things Considered, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and CNN.com. He and his wife raise two sons in New York City. He is online at MitchHorowitz.com and twitter.com/MitchHorowitz.