This is an excerpt from my upcoming book Dear Charlotte, which tells the winding story of the triumph and folly of forever trying to better yourself. This letter is from the chapter on "The Pursuit of Happiness."
Charlotte, nearly every aspect of my life is being turned upside-down because of meditation, and it's a bit overwhelming. I've been biking all over Austin during SXSW1, hawking my new site, 3D Porch2. I'm like a one-man mobile marketing machine. I have with me two 3D cameras holstered to my hips, along with a pouch for a hundred red-blue 3D glasses. I stopped by the mobile Apple Store, where there was a line wrapped around the block with nerds waiting for the iPad 2. I then just went up to random people and asked, "Have you ever had a 3D photo taken before? Would you like to?" I then hand them a pair of 3D glasses and a business card.
It's the kind of stunt I would've never imagined seeing myself do before meditation. I put the whole site together in just a month, and now it's on CNN. In the run-up to the convention, I was really anxious and nervous, and I almost pulled the plug on my product launch. But I just meditated all those issues out.
And that's just my work life. Wait till you hear how my social life is going. I've been going out nearly every night for the past couple weeks. All the energy that used to be set aside for neurotic over-thinking has been freed up. When friends text me, "Do you want to check out the new wine bar?" or "Do you want to check out the new food trailer?", I don't think twice before responding, "Yes!"
This new "yes-to-everything" attitude has extended to my love-life, and I've been going on date after date, bridging small threads, like a friend-of-friend tagging along at a bar, into potential flames. I think that any day now, I will have broken my streak of being single.
This is all overwhelming, but I know it's a good problem to have.3
1 SXSW (South-by-Southwest) is a film, interactive, and music mega-festival held over ten days in Austin. The festival takes place at both the convention center, and in venues all over town, turning Austin into a giant party for effectively an entire month.
2 3D Porch is the number one 3D photo-sharing site. 3D photos are taken with special cameras that have two lenses. Around SXSW 2011, Nintendo released the 3DS, a portable gaming device with a 3D camera. I created this site in anticipation of the millions of kids I knew who would then be roaming the world with a 3D camera in their pocket.
3 The last time I felt this way was in the summer of 2009, when the secondary effects of cognitive therapy rippled through my life.
