An Aversion to Shopping

Posted on 01/27/2013 by Ethan Holmes

Ever since I wrote Live Your Life In A Crap Free Zone I’ve discovered I have an aversion to shopping. I know that women who own 127 pair of shoes and men who own every Ipod ever made won’t readily understand this, yet there it is.

I’ve always thought walking into a place like Sam’s Club or Costco must be the closest we ‘normal’ people will come to running onto the playing field of a major league stadium. These places are a cavernous, monumental testimony to the American culture of want, need and must have. The only thing lacking is a double line of sixty-year-old cheerleader/checkout people to cheer you on and a ten by ten feet stack of Budweiser cans to come bursting through with your shopping cart to the thunderous applause of your fellow shoppers. (Most valuable player would be the first person to get to the checkout counter and max out their American Express card.)

I think they should put you in a golf cart when you go to these places, not push a shopping cart at you. After all, you can already push around those eight foot flatbed carts. Why not hitch one onto the back of a golf cart? I also believe their should be an eight, nine and pitching iron in the back so you can get the attention of the store employee you caught a fleeting glimpse of between the dog food palettes half a store away. (What does that look like to you Pete; maybe about 110 yards? Hand my pitching wedge, will ya?)

Before “the economy” became something we whisper about in subdued terms as though we were pointing at a mutual friend who just got herpes, I used to go hunting through Costco looking for crap to buy. I felt as though if I didn’t own it I was somehow deprived. Little did I realize at the time that it was more like depraved. I would buy a newer, shinier, bigger set of stainless steel kitchen utensils despite the fact that I already owned a plastic set and a wooden set, (my favorite). Apparently at some point I was preparing to cook for a very large group of friends when I actually only have about two.

To this day I still own fourteen LED flashlights which I now must go to Costco and buy $480 worth of batteries for about every three months.

Advertising media had done their jobs well. I wanted. I thought I needed. I was fairly certain I had to have. Then “the economy” reached up and smacked me back to reality just as it did for many of my readers. I lost it all. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say ‘lost’ since that makes it sound as though I was carrying it all around and it fell out of my pockets in my travels. No, I had to sell much of it to pay bills when income dribbled to nothing, usually at far below market value and garage sale prices. That’s one of the reasons I said in Live Your Life In A Crap Free Zone that the only person your stuff is worth anything to is you. If you don’t believe me gather your kids together and ask them what they would do with your stuff if you kicked the proverbial bucket tomorrow.

Have you ever seen the difference between really old grocery stores and the new ones. It’s stark, rather like the difference between photographs of me from thirty years ago and now. (Good thing I burned them all.) I recently had occasion to visit an ancient looking Safeway in a small town in southern Oregon. Now I know what it must have felt like when archaeologists first walked into King Tut’s tomb. (I wonder if they looked around and said, “Gee, it’s really small in here.”) That’s what I said when I walked into this place. It looked like it had four aisles instead of the usual twenty-four today’s stores have. It looked and smelled quaintly old with large black and white linoleum tiles on the floor that appeared to have boot prints from pre-Civil War days. Unlike modern stores, the cereal was five steps from the milk and the cleaning supplies were just adjacent to Wednesday Only Special End-Cap Sale of a Free Bottle of Aspirin With Every Four Boxes of Pantie Liners you purchase. (What a deal!)

I couldn’t find any statistics concerning the amount of grocery store items in a typical chain grocery from the mid 1950’s but I did find one source that said the average amount of grocery store items in a 1980’s era store was about fifteen thousand. Today that number is fifty thousand. All I can say to that is they haven’t been in a Fred Meyer store. Again, we’re back in southern Oregon and I walk into this place that makes the local Walmart Supercenter look like a master bedroom closet. Somebody named Fred really, really gets it about one-stop shopping! If this thing had apartments you could live here! There’s nothing you can’t find at this Fred Meyer. I went in there one morning at around 10 a.m. and looked at everything from snow chains to banana pudding. I could have rented a four bedroom apartment, (and I’ll bet they have them; I just couldn’t find them,) and outfitted/furnished the entire thing right there in the store. I could have topped it all off rather nicely with my very own Oregon Ducks key-chain and license plate.

Let’s just say that by the time I found my way out of that massive consumer nightmare it was 8:30 p.m., I was exhausted and it took me another four hours to find my vehicle. Next time I’m bringing a backpack and a GPS. (Never mind; you can buy them there.)

I find myself just going in for what old people call ‘the basics’. Even with that as a goal you can still spend a hefty chunk of income. Last week I was in Costco. I walked out with butter, eggs, coffee and pasta and I was $75 lighter than when I went in. I also came out with one less gadget/device/machine that was going to mysteriously implode just after the warranty ran out, ‘needed some assembly’, was broken already, required a call to a robotic call center in India or was taped back together with duct tape, re-packaged, (sort of), and put back on the store shelf to be sold to a sucker like me.

Ethan Holmes is the author of Live Your Life In A Crap Free Zone now available in Digital Ebook and in Paperback.

Ethan Holmes has authored five books all of which may be previewed at his website.

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The Tao of Success, Part 5; At This Moment

Posted on 03/28/2012 by Ethan Holmes

You’re driving to work one morning and you see a motorist standing by his disabled car on the shoulder of the road, kicking his flat tire and screaming at the car and his cell phone. His anger and frustration are obvious to anyone and yet it is all useless.

No matter how much we protest the events of life, we cannot change what just happened. We cannot change what happened ten years ago, ten days ago or ten seconds ago. It is done and one second later you may only choose to react or act, so learn to live “at this moment”. This moment is all you can do anything about. This moment is what will bring you success. What happened yesterday cannot possibly bring you success.

If you are out riding a bicycle one morning and you run into a stone and fall head-first over the handle bars into the dirt, you can do nothing about what just happened. You can stand up, stare at the offending stone and curse at it yet that won’t change the scrapes on your hands and knees or the dust all over you. You can choose to dust yourself off and get back on the bike to continue your ride knowing full well that you cannot turn back the clock to thirty seconds before you hit the rock and somehow miraculously see it this time.

One of the most useless phrases in human vocabulary is “I wish”. A long time ago my mother used to respond to that phrase with “If wishes were fishes, we’d all have a fry.” It was annoying at the time but I get it now. “I wish I had seen that rock” is a most useless statement. “I wish I had known I was going to get a flat on the way to work” is even more useless. My mother was trying, in her own inimitable fashion, to tell me how useless it is to wish. Until recently I had almost as much trouble with Dr. Wayne Dyer’s philosophy of, “if you don’t have it, you must not need it” and “you must not need it because you don’t have it”. “If you needed it, it would be here.” I get that now too.

Whatever you do for a living, an avocation, and whatever happens in that experience, you may only ‘do’ at this moment. Participating in the moment enables you to move only forward and direct no energies whatever toward the past. If you come in to work and someone left a pile of papers on your desk to deal with, do you then waste your time chasing down the person who did it to confront them about why all this paperwork is on your desk? Do you, instead, choose to be in the moment and understand that the pile of paper is going nowhere until you deal with it? The sooner you direct your energies toward the pile of papers, the sooner they will disappear. (Ah! Success at last.)

Your child is hurt on the playground and comes home with a bloody lip. Do you drop everything and go find the cause of the bloody lip? Does finding the cause of the bloody lip fix it? Of course not, and yet, what is the first question out of everyone’s mouth? “What happened?” Never mind what happened. Be in the moment. Tend to the child. Tend to his bloody lip. Tend to his pain and discomfort. That is what will prove to productive. When you think about it, anything that caused the bloody lip cannot fix the bloody lip. For the rest of his life that child will know and remember that he got a bloody lip from falling off the swing or Johnny punching him. You can’t do a darn thing about his bloody lip except fix it.

You will be amazed at how your thinking will begin to change as you take a moment after something, anything has happened and ask yourself; “what can I do about right now, at this moment?” What can I do to see success? I can tell you from experience it’s going to take some effort, a radical change in thought patterns. We are taught from day one to react. Don’t react; ACT! Act at this moment, for this moment. This moment is all you can do anything about.

Don’t forget that if you sign up to be a follower of Ethan Holmes Blog Podcast you are welcome to a free copy of Ethan Holmes’ collection of short stories titled, A Multi-Pack of Brain Flakes. Just go HERE to find out how to do it.

Also as a marking of the recent passing of my one hundred eighty-second birthday, (isn’t Botox great?!), I am offering a FREE COPY of my murder mystery novel, The Keystone,  through Smashwords for a limited time. Just use coupon code VT83S at checkout. The book is available in all digital formats for all digital readers. You may read a Free excerpt or allow me to read the excerpt for you HERE. Happy Birthday to me, and to you too!

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The Tao of Success, Part 4; Choose

Posted on 03/20/2012 by Ethan Holmes

“Alice came to a fork in the road. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked.
‘Where do you want to go?’ responded the Cheshire Cat.
‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered.
‘Then,’ said the Cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Our lives are full of choices good and bad. To utter the phrase, “I had no choice” is to simply proclaim that you chose what you thought was best at that moment. It was not necessarily what you should have chosen, what was right to choose or what would have been better had you given it a little more thought.

I recall listening to Dr. Wayne Dyer on CD a couple of years ago proclaiming that most of what occurs in your life is the direct result of choices you have made. At the time I thought he was nuts. How could everything that happened to me be solely a result of my choices? In my logical mind that equated to making me one hundred percent responsible for everything. How can that be? Other people have free will and choices to make and when they make choices that affect me then how can what happens be my fault?

Then one day I had an epiphany; one of many to come although I did not know it at the time. The epiphany was this; there is no such thing as a car accident! It doesn’t sound related, does it? Yet it is. Think about this for a moment. If you drive down the road talking on your cell phone, texting, (my first grade teacher wants to know when that word became a verb), or looking at a video you made a choice to pay attention to that device and not your driving. If the squeaking front wheel on your car makes you nuts and yet you do nothing about it, that is a choice which may later cause you to slam into that stopped school bus. Choose to drive through a snowstorm to get to your girl/boyfriend’s house and slide off the road into a ditch. Was the snowstorm the problem or was the choice to drive in it? Choose to drive around with minimum, or worse, no insurance coverage and then hit a bicyclist on the road. Is it the bicyclist’s fault for being there or is the choice to not cover your driving that lands you a lawsuit for damages and injury? Choose to drive on a balding tire. Is it the tire that causes the ensuing crash or is it the choice not to replace it right now? Everything that happens in a car crash can be traced back to a choice, whether it is the person who leaves the bar drunk and chooses to drive, or the person who chooses to not maintain their vehicle and yes, the person who chooses distracted driving. Think about it carefully for a moment and you will readily see what I mean.

Here’s another perfect example. I know someone who got into a lot of legal trouble and was facing six years in prison, all over a choice he made. One day he chose to get into a verbal altercation with three women. They then thought it was funny to call the police and tell them he had viciously attacked them with a knife as retribution. He was in a heap of trouble and under arrest before the afternoon was out. For years afterward he would gladly tell anyone who would listen the story of his victimization by the women, the cops, the justice system and even the lawyer he initially hired to defend him. Yes, the women falsely accused him and filed false charges. Yes, the police helped them do it, lied about it, did everything possible to see him in jail and then developed unexplained memory lapses at trial. And yes, it cost this person over eight thousand dollars to defend himself, yet one day he had an epiphany. He suddenly realized that if he had made the simple choice to keep his window up and his mouth closed, none of this would ever have happened!

Choices are a powerful thing. They will, of a certainty, steer you down one path or another. What path are you on right now and what choice(s) did you make to get there? Are you making choices that will get to where you want to go in life or are you making choices that seem the easiest at the moment or that make you feel the most comfortable right now? Are you making excuses about poor choices to justify them in your head?

I chose, long ago, to be what I was supposed to be. I chose to pursue that which I love to do and to share it with those who would have some appreciate for it or some small impact on their lives. That choice never made me uncomfortable. It made a lot of people around me uncomfortable. My family and girlfriends had a favorite phrase. “Why don’t you get a real job?” When there were hard times and the bear was eating me instead of me eating the bear, people around me would invariably point out that it was because of my bad choices.

Choose! If you want to lose weight, don’t want, do, choose. If you want to be a better golfer, choose. If you wish to be a wealthy, famous writer, don’t wish, choose! You know what it takes. You know the path. Sometimes knowing the path, or thinking we know the path is the exact obstacle to the choice. Dr. Dyer says, “If you think the way will be difficult, it will be.” I agree wholeheartedly. You are choosing that. You are choosing and programming the journey. It will be difficult. It will take a long time. I will not have the time I need to do this.

Choose! Choose otherwise! We do not have time. We do not possess time. Time is time. What you choose to do with it is what matters. The choices you make will put you on a path, a path of your choosing. Know where you want to go and choose.

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The Tao of Success, Part 3; Patience

Posted on 03/13/2012 by Ethan Holmes

The mulberry tree grows and upon it grows the mulberry leaf. The mulberry leaf is consumed by the silkworm. The silkworm then spins silk. “With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes satin. With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.”

Does this process sound familiar to you? Is it not an analogous reference to the whole process of writing from thought to book, to the distribution of that book to others for consumption? If so, is patience not a necessary and vital part of the process?

I see so many writers out there who look for instantaneous gratification and an immediate fulfillment of their expectations and definitions of success. Who among us would not like to put a book out there on a distributor or a major venue such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble and wake up the next morning and see five hundred, a thousand, maybe five thousand sales? Is that realistic? Is it truly a sign of success? Do you want your flame to glow oh so brightly and intensely for a short period of time or would you prefer to start a slow, ever-growing burn based on the deep-heated coals of doing what your passion requires you to do?

Unless you have a budget that allows you to blanket the Internet and other forms of media with advertising you are probably not going to see instant success in the sales of your books. I believe that the release of your work, whatever it may be, is rather like planting a seed in the garden. If you run out and check the spot where you planted it every day from the first you will be disappointed for many days. You will, in fact, being doing an awful lot of staring at a seemingly inanimate lump of dirt. Yet if you water that lump, feed that lump, make sure that lump is located in sunlight, you do not have an inanimate lump of dirt. Underneath the surface everything you did is now interacting with each other to produce what you are waiting for. The seed is there, the soil is there giving the seed nutrients and a good environment, the water is there, the sunlight is there to warm and activate the lump.

One day, weeks from now, you walk outside and there, protruding from that lump of dirt is a stout, vibrant green seedling reaching for the sky. The fruit of your work is now evident and yet it took such a long time and all that preparatory work. While standing there gazing at the fruit of your labors, you realize in that instant; it was all worth it.

Should we not view our writing in a similar manner? I think we should remember if it took a lot of effort to get the book from being a thought, onto paper (or computer), edited, polished, designed, formatted, submitted, distributed, promoted, we should also remember the results will not be any faster than the process. “Consider the hour-glass; there is nothing to be accomplished by rattling or shaking; you have to wait patiently until the sand, grain by grain, has run from one funnel into the other.” John Christian Morgenstern

The next time you are sitting there griping and moaning about what is not happening out there in regard to your sales, perhaps you should take a moment instead to say ‘thank you’. Be grateful that you are able to do this. As little as ten years ago little or none of this was available to the unpublished, unknown author. We were at the mercy of agents and publishers who, on the whim of the day, summarily struck down our pittance, often without bothering to read a single word of the book.

Today it does not matter what you write, how much you write, what genre it is in or even if you can write well. Anyone can publish a book, anywhere, anytime. Say ‘thank you’, not ‘where’s my damn sales?’. Be grateful that we can do this. It is as though we were once living in a dilapidated Brownstone apartment in New York and now we live on a rich farm in Georgia. We can grow anything we want. So get out there and dig, get out there and plant, get out there and water and feed. Just don’t look for corn and tomatoes tomorrow.

“Someone has defined genius as intensity of purpose: the ability to do, the patience to wait… Put these together and you have genius, and you have achievement.” Leo J. Muir

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The Tao of Success, Part 2; Stop Saying ‘I Want’

Posted on 03/04/2012 by Ethan Holmes

It’s one of the first phrases we ever learn to say. We start saying it almost as soon as we are able to speak anything resembling a language; I want. I want my toy, I want a bottle, I want a nap, I want you to change my diaper. We even learn to cry and whine to get what we ‘want’ when the message doesn’t seem to be getting through. As life goes on that never seems to go away. The very phrase “I want” seems to have its own whine embedded deep behind it. Try standing in front of a mirror and saying things like, “I want a new car” or “I want a bigger house” and “I want to be a rich, famous author”. Sounds a little like whining, doesn’t it? Funny thing is it doesn’t get you one step closer to your desire, what you want. It doesn’t even feel good to stand there in front of yourself and say those things because you are telling yourself what you don’t have. Imagine how it sounds to anyone else.

Now stand in front of the mirror and say, “I am a damn good writer and people would like to read what I have written.” See how much better that feels inside? Nothing about that statement is a position of lack or want. It is an affirmation of what you are and what you will do/are doing right now. Say things like, “right at this moment I have everything that I need,” because you do. If you truly needed it, it would be right there. “I have a good car; it’s reliable and gets me wherever I choose to go.” “I have a good house. It keeps me warm in winter, it keeps me dry when it rains, it holds all my loved ones.”

“I want” comes from a position of lack, as in, I want this because I don’t have it. An acknowledgement of lack gets you nowhere in life and does nothing to get rid of lack. It is an affirmation of nothing else besides your perceived need for whatever you want. One of my favorite quotes about this, and I am paraphrasing here, says, “if you think you need something, you must not because it’s not here.”

Is it okay to want, to desire? Personally I believe it is what helps us to set a goal in mind. The question is; to do what then? Do we simply walk around saying “I want” and letting everyone around us know that we have this need, this desire? Or would it be better to set an immediate affirmation that we are setting in motion whatever it takes, whatever it requires to realize that desire? The want, the desire should be a fleeting thought to simply establish what you are going to do about it.

It does no good whatever to sit around and constantly repeat to myself, “I want to be a rich, famous author” or “I want people to buy my books and like me and what I write”. Doing that, I will never be either one of those. That is where my energy and effort is going. What will get me there is to do. What will get me there is to be. What will get me there is the affirmation that I am a writer and that people will be interested in what I have written as long as I am writing it the best I can and it is being presented in a manner that people will want to read. The rest of it flows into place.

Ask yourself why you want what you want. What hole will it fill in your life? What is there right now that you want, that you truly think you need, and yet you are somehow getting along without at this very moment of need? How will it change your life if you get what you want? Will you then want something else?

Replace ‘I want’ with ‘I am’! I am a good writer. I am on the path to success because I write, I do, I accomplish. I do not ‘want’ to be a writer. Someone paid me to write something many years ago, and I have been paid many times since then to write things. People are buying my books as I write this and I am giving books away; therefore I am a writer. You are whatever you are doing at the moment. If you are working at being a writer, a car mechanic, a dressmaker or a nurse then that is what you are. You are not wanting to be any of those, you are that the moment you take the first step toward your destination and keep walking “confidently in the direction of your dreams.”

I would like to invite you, in conclusion, to partake of something I have never offered before. For a limited time I am offering to all who would like it, (notice I did not say want or need,) an absolutely free copy of my collection of short stories titled A Multi-Pack of Brain Flakes. It is available for immediate download at Smashwords until March 10 via their “Read An Ebook Week” yearly promotion. Just use the coupon code in the upper right corner of that page. In addition, anyone who becomes a subscriber to the Ethan Holmes Blog and/or Podcast is eligible for a free copy of A Multi-Pack of Brain Flakes. Just go to this page to see how easy it is to get your free copy.  Very soon I will also have it available on my website, www.ethanholmes.com in conjunction with the release of my books, Earth’s Blood and The Keystone in audio and paperback. Thank you kindly for your time. EH

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The Tao of Success, Part 1; Remove The Boulders

Posted on 02/28/2012 by Ethan Holmes

First and foremost one must define success, each on their own terms. Is it the procurement of money? Is it simply to be known, as in famous? Is it to be acknowledged as a good writer? Perhaps it is as simple a thing as writing itself; the ability to put on paper, or in these times on a screen, the thoughts, passions and experiences swimming around in your head. Once that is defined your journey begins. No journey can truly exist without a destination; that would simply be wandering.

You have your destination before you and now it remains for you to do two basic things to get to your destination. First you must step forward. As Henry David Thoreau said, “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.” The second is to summarily and systematically remove what Louise Hay of Hayhouse Publishing calls ‘boulders’ from your path. Boulders are obstacles, real or imaginary, sitting in your path to your destination, success. Sit there for a moment and imagine each thing that you think is standing in your way. It’s a boulder. How do you get the boulder out of the way? There is no “but”, no excuse, no “I can’t”. You present yourself with no other option other than to remove the boulder. How do you do it?

As Louise Hay puts it in the interview I recently watched, as you travel along your path to success, you will find that the boulders get smaller and smaller. Sure, every once in a while a sizable boulder may fall down onto the road you travel. Yet remember, your only option is to remove the boulder, not make excuses. One does not “go confidently in the direction of your dreams” only to stop or retreat in the face of a boulder. Confidence says ‘get the boulder out of the way or find some way around it’.

When I was a professional trainer I used to tell my clients that there were only three reasons not to show up for a workout; fire, flood or death. The rest were just excuses. A great book that will help you to see just how many excuses there are in our lives, how much we use them and how to get rid of them is Excuses Be Gone by Dr. Wayne Dyer.

Eliminate the boulders in your path of life. Start by eliminating boulders which manifest themselves in the common terms in your speech. You can begin with the word ‘but’. I would ask you to go a whole day without using the word ‘but’. It’s a word that immediately negates whatever you just said before it anyway. Why would you want to do that? I want to work out but I don’t have time. I want to go for a walk but it’s raining. I love you but I can’t be with you. I want to be a published writer but I don’ t know how to do it.

You get the picture. ‘But’ slams the brakes on anything you just said because you are immediately telling yourself and the person you might be talking to why it isn’t going to happen.

There are an amazing amount of other terms we use every day in our thoughts which become manifested boulders on our path to success; words like, I can’t, I don’t know, I won’t, I should, I would, I’m trying.

After your finished with a day of not using the word ‘but’ then you can spend a day without using the term, ‘I’m trying’. Trying is not doing. Doing is not trying.

I’m sure if you thought about it for a moment or two you could come up with some terms that hang around in your head or your conversation with others which have a negative influence on where you’re headed. Thus they are boulders in your path. Removing these thoughts and terms from both your thinking and your conversation will greatly reduce the boulders in your path. Who among us would not rather walk on a smooth, unobstructed path rather than one on which we are always having to remove, move, climb over or demolish boulders?

My objective is to break the cycle of these long-established habits and thoughts which have led me to the point I am at now. I cannot do anything about five minutes ago. I can do something about right now. Right now I am not going to let any boulders stand in my way of success, and remember, every moment in the future is right now when you get there.

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