The Storms Which Clear the Path

Laws of attraction, the Ides of March and derailing doom. It's been a helluva week for magical thinking.

Photo by Cristian Escobar on Unsplash

[This week I come to you with an essay which was written before an unexpected conclusion came to pass. I’m publishing it unedited with an epilogue, to perhaps further underscore some of its themes. I have either found the key to a successful life or been mentally abducted by a new age cult. Feel free to judge either way…]

Wednesday 19th February, 2025

In recent days, I’ve been ghosting a book chapter focused on the concept of energy vibrations and the laws of attraction. For anyone who hasn’t heard of this philosophy (if you’ve spent any time on TikTok you won’t have missed it), the idea is that having positive thoughts will attract positive outcomes into your life; conversely if you get stuck in a downer you’ll be on a one way spiral to skidrow. Quite simply, like attracts like. Originating from New Thought, an American religious movement which came together in the early 19th century, these principles form the basic tenets of manifestation, Lucky Girl syndrome and a whole genre of books spanning The Secret by Rhonda Byrne to Manifest by Roxie Nafousi. Skeptics, of whom there are many, will have their neck hairs on end, and I will state immediately that none of these principles have any grounding in empirical data. You’ll find a lot of pseudoscience couched in semi-religious language, but nothing cold or hard for us to prove anything. Many people feel like Sam, my brother and subeditor, who has succinctly added to his notes on this piece: ‘this is absolute drivel.’ So just for the record, it’s not that I’m naïvely swallowing anything here. I just personally like to keep an open mind.

Over the same temporal space and time as writing about all of the above, I also experienced a real punch in the face from the universe. Now surveying the fallout, I’m finding it hard not to view it through a lens of energy and it’s led me to have some serious questions for my laws of attraction disciples.

Earlier this morning, with children in tow, I was confronted by my nemesis: the single magpie. Not once, might I add. Over the course of a two mile ride, I saw no less than six individual black and white ghouls—one even stopped in my path causing me to swerve with my precious cargo on board. Birds are chillingly Hitchcockean in zone 3. Long-term readers will know about my battles with superstition and you’re going to have to forgive me for standing on the fence when it comes to one kind of magical thinking while plainly being impacted on a cellular level by another. Logic makes very little inroad when you’ve been raised with these kind of insane belief systems. However much of an atheist, however respectful of science, however cynical I might be about spirituality, I have an unbending attachment to certain old wives’ tales which even as an adult I’ve found impossible to shake. It’s frankly mortifying.

Anyway, about halfway through the attack of the monochromatic avians, I noticed and the invisible penny of my superstitious mind dropped. I stopped thinking, oh, it’s just birds and started thinking… it was an omen. Totemic of doom. A harbinger of dread. For all the ‘don’t be ridiculous’ going through my brain, there was also the whisper, ‘you know what this means. Winter is coming.’

I got home and totally forgot the unhinged internal monologue, did a couple of hours of my double life (filmed a reel, cycled three loads of washing, called Hounslow council etc) and set off to the train station for a moderately important meeting with another of my authors. We had a third, new person meeting us for a kick off session and as the chair of the get together, I was looking forward to getting some chapters rounded off and bonding. I love being amongst clever, interesting women and that was my destination.

As I pulled up, I saw the train had been cancelled and it was a 40 minute wait for the next one. Gah. What followed was a litany of bad luck clangers. From cancelled Ubers to gridlock traffic. From cycling on a Lime bike like Bradley Wiggins before realising said electric vehicle was unparkable within a mile radius from my meeting, to being totally and completely lost without phone reception in the city I’ve lived in for 20 years. You all know a day like this. Worst of all was the moment I realised I’d left the fundamental tool of my trade, aka my laptop in the sodding pay-per-use bike basket at least half a mile away. The sheer panic when it dawned on me, and the effort that went into sprinting back, desperately hopeful. Of course it was gone, lost to the city. Forty two minutes late for the meeting, I finally gave in and called it a day. ‘Twas a true clusterfuck of an afternoon.

There’s rarely ever any warning of the days on which the universe turns the eye of Sauron to focus on little old you. ‘Beware the Ides of March,’ so a fortune teller tells Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, prophesying the assassination of Rome’s most fabled leader. Aside from literally referring to March 15th, the Ides have come to symbolise those days of doom which fate has lying in wait for you and the limits we humans have in preventing our own tragedies. Sometimes, no matter what the hell you do, the sun rises on a Wednesday and that shit is coming without warning. It calls to mind that Hardy quote (via David Nichols’ One Day) fromTess of the D’Urbervilles, 'She suddenly thought, one afternoon, that there was another date, of greater importance; that of her own death; a day which lay sly and unseen among all other days of the year, but not the less surely there'. If fate has plans, you’re dust. Apologies for the bleakery here, promise I’ll be getting to a more upbeat tempo pronto.

Every month has its own Ides, but mine arrived entirely off-schedule. I’d woken up if not full of the joys of spring, well slept and nourished. I wasn’t on the back foot, or no more so than I am every day.

Or was I? That is the question I would like to pose to the energy attraction believers.

Is it possible that I was indeed harbouring sufficient negativity in my aura to attract the turd of a day? I’d been a little hmmm, low mood over the weekend, but it was more ground down than overwhelmingly Debbie. I was tired and felt the viral load of the bugs that are going around challenging my white blood cells. My knee hurts a bit, I’d had a bit of a tumble on my bike too. I guess I was a little defeated. But that surely doesn’t equal an Ides doing its worst?

Since, I’ve wondered if perhaps the mere recognition of my absurd superstitious thinking could have dropped a fly in the ointment, souring the flavour of my aura, energetically drawing in the dread. Was it my belief that ruination was coming that ushered it in? Or did the bell toll as a foreboding warning? Tough to make a call on these, at best, woo woo questions.

Now I’ve re-centered myself (a burger in bed, Valentine’s day chocolate box, White Lotus series 3) obviously, I can see there may be other non mystical, mythical factors at play. We’re all doing too fucking much! Why was I racing across town on trains, bikes and automobiles when I had kids to pick up a couple of hours later? Why does it seem normal to squeeze ourselves dry? You can only cinch a belt so tight before it snaps after all. In saying all of that, my day of Ides started out as at most a 2/10 on the Richter scale of chaos. I’d been sober for a week, I had done yoga and breathwork. I’d eaten chia for breakfast. There have been plenty of days on my calendar when any normal human would see that there was a high chance of disaster if I kept to my planned activities—but that particular one wasn’t it.

Whether it was my energy vibrations or my scattergun lifestyle to blame, what you gonna do? I believe the most important thing when you encounter adversity is to keep your chin up and not let the bad spiral to worse. I have been there, sinking in the quicksand unable to get my footing. Previously when things have gone to black, I have used days like this as evidence that I’ve been cursed or born under a broken star. But I changed my luck and that isn’t my life anymore. I don’t feel that way now and I didn’t feel that way even in the moment. Another law—the law of averages—says I was due a kick up the jacksie. Things have been good for a long time, it was just my turn.

After taking a beat I’ve also seen the day in a different light. Clearly, the financial aspect of losing such a big investment is galling. But it’s not devastating in the way it would have been five or even three years ago. This is the first time something like this has happened and my body hasn’t fractured along the fault-lines of scarcity. My guts haven’t twisted into unbearable gripe; I haven’t spent the rest of the day running to and from the loo, struggling to talk in sentences because I am so unspeakably stressed. I have some savings, I also have about 17 jobs, so I am in the extremely fortunate position to be able to afford to buy a new computer. One of my mantras over the month (I know, I know) has been ‘I am abundant, I am successful’. If this day was evidence of anything, it was this.

There have been times in my life when this loss would have meant a bank loan or that I’d have to cancel my summer holiday. Those days have been over for a good while, but it has taken me until now to really appreciate on a bone deep level that my circumstances have changed. I have operated so long from a position of lack and that has coloured my choices in a way which likely haven’t been the most positive. That shit is also very difficult to shake. Not so long ago, I would still be nervous to check my bank balance, even though I knew logically that I wasn’t in the red anymore. This episode has made me realise those fears which have held me back in lots of ways are no longer part of my aura.

The truth is that this day of apparent misfortune was really proof of my good fortune. It came as a test of my beliefs about myself and my measured reaction, the quick bounce back and focus on my gratitude at being in a better position (both financially and mentally) than ever before in my life is the real story. We’re all trying our damndest to understand the world and navigate the endless forces which are out of our control. I empathise deeply with the desire to grab hold of a system which seems to make it make sense, so I would never mock anyone who tethers themselves to any philosophy that helps them. I think the place that I’m personally shooting for is a world in which no matter what happens, I know I’m never going back to mental oblivion. There may be no such thing as fate or serendipity or vibration or indeed any laws of any kind. But there are bad days from which we can’t hide. It’s the power we give those days which defines the colour and flavour of the ones that follow.

N.B: as I love a wormhole, according to the ONS your sly death date is most likely to fall in January, particularly the first two weeks. Good to know we’ve passed that high risk window for another year. See I told you upbeat was coming. I’ll be back next week with more uplifting morbidity!

___

Epilogue, Thursday 20th February 2025

For anyone who follows me on social media, you will likely know that I received a message in my DMs from a kind soul who had a) found my laptop casually discarded in a Lime Bike, then b) found me online to let me know they had it. Aside from restoring faith in the humanity, it’s a very good story for the high vibe energy believers. Did my positive reaction to my day of doom lead to the positive outcome of laptop reunion? Who knows (I’m probably about 9% more convinced, but then I believe in birds, so don’t mind me). The mysteries of the universe remain a mystery, but what we can say for sure is that there are good people in the world. This was a beautiful reminder that even as it feels the clouds are closing in, we mustn’t lose hope.