Asking, Trusting, & Receiving

I fancy myself pretty good at a lot of things.  I’m smart, I’m a good listener, I’m self-reliant, and I’m a good cook.  I’ve been called a “MacGuyver,” and a “renaissance man,” for my various talents.

But one thing I truly suck at is asking for help, and then trusting that I’ll receive it.

Our move to Colorado has been exciting, fun, interesting, difficult, frustrating, and exceptionally rewarding.  Within a matter of months, we made the decision to come here, found a way to make it happen, sold a home, found a new place to live, and prepared and executed the actual move itself.

Phew.

But with all of those moving parts, oddly enough, I feel like we haven’t encountered too much resistance in the logistics of moving out here.  And again, oddly enough, I feel like this mostly has to do with our ability to ask and trust.

Over the course of the past year and a half or so, Rachel and I have been doing a lot of work on energy and, specifically, the Law of Attraction.  Top performer after top performer has stated, in some various form or another, that what you focus on is what you achieve in your life.  Now, I’m no woo-woo believer, and I’m not saying that things will magically pop out of thin air without any work.  But let me put it in these terms: If you set a goal, say, buying a dream car, you can come up with all sorts of creative ways to achieve that goal.  Maybe you work 3 jobs in order to pay for it.  Maybe you buy a junker and fix it up yourself.  If you really truly want to, you can find a way to buy that car.  And not only that, but opportunities will spring up along the way that may have come up anyways, but you’ll now see those opportunities through the lens of wanting to buy that car.  So when your friend says, “hey, come to the scrap yard with me so I can find a part for my ride,” you’ll walk through and suddenly think, “whoa…that chassis is exactly what I was looking for!  This was meant to be!”

When we visited Colorado earlier this year, we met with several friends who let us know that we aren’t alone on our trip.  Almost everyone we met in the DC area seemed to be from Colorado, have lived in Colorado and wanted to move back, was on vacation from Colorado, or had a friend there that they absolutely had to hook us up with.  When we announced our intentions to move out here, one of our friends reached out to us and graciously let us stay with her until we could find a place of our own.  We also had another friend reach out to us and recommend an outstanding realtor, who proceeded to sell our home in one weekend(!).

What was the common thread in all of this?  Rachel and I had visited this place once and said to each other, “This is where we want to be.”  I had a hard time believing in all of this, even though time and time again it was proven to me.  But I somehow knew it would happen, one way or another.  That we would make it happen.

As if making a move halfway across the country wasn’t enough proof, let me get more specific. After a frustrating day of apartment searching, Rachel and I had absolutely we realized we needed to really get clear on what we wanted. So naturally, we went to an awesome coffee shop, sipped some java, and made a list of all of the attributes we wanted in a new place: an affordable (for us) rental, in Boulder, with character, with a view, not far from hiking trails and outdoor recreational opportunities but close enough to necessities like groceries, and in a neighborhood we liked.  The one discrepancy was the exact part of Boulder. After our cursory exploration of neighborhoods, we thought North Boulder was the neighborhood to shoot for, so that was what we wrote.

It probably took a few days, but for the purposes of this story, it was practically immediate.  We scrolled through Craigslist and found a place.  It was perfect.  It ticked all our boxes, with the single exception that it was in South Boulder.  To be fair, we hadn’t even visited South Boulder before viewing the rental.  If we had, that’s what would have been listed in our journal; with it’s crazy quiet neighborhoods, flatirons on one side and dedicated open space on the other, dogs on every corner, and trails in every direction it was exactly what we were looking for.

Wow.

My mind was blown.  As if I had needed any more proof, here we are now unpacking in our new place.  The place we asked for.  In all of the noise of our search for a new home, we found EXACTLY what we asked for.

So why do I still have a problem with Trusting?  With simply setting a goal and looking for the means to realize that goal?  Perhaps it’s the stigma of woo-woo.  Or maybe it’s the scary realization that I can actually have the things that I want in life if I clearly focus.

And in case you want to see a bit of the character of our new place, check out this video of our Christmas Tree lighting…