Be Careful What You Wish For...

Today's lyrics are from Careful What You Wish For by Jonatha Brooke.

Careful what you wish for, careful what you do
Even when you whisper, someone's listening to you
Careful what you wish for, careful what you say
Careful what you wish for, 'cuz it just might come true someday

In late December of 2007 I started reading The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. It's all about the law of attraction and how we attract what we put out into the Universe (negative attracts negative, positive attracts positive, etc.). I was at a really low point in my life about then (as I've blogged about before) and I thought I'd give the law of attraction a try to see if I could perhaps make a change in my life. I figured it couldn't hurt, I mean after all it's really just thinking and God knows I do PLENTY of that already so what could a little more (and more focused) thinking hurt?

Frankly I didn't really think it worked very well (apparently I am an immediate results kind of person when it comes to stuff like this, I have to work on that). Sure, things got better for me as last year progressed peaking sometime in July, but I attributed that to finally moving on after Ms. Ex and finding FMHW and finally feeling good about myself again, like I had direction and a purpose and of all things feeling that I actually had friends. I kind of forgot about the thoughts I sent out to the Universe as the months wore on. Until recently that is, when I started reflecting on my life as I am so wont to do. And that's when I remembered exactly what I'd sent out to the Universe last January.

And you know what? I got precisely what I asked for. I'm not going to go into the details of what exactly I asked for and truly believed I would get (because believing is part of the secret to the law of attraction). But I got it for sure, there's no doubt in my mind that the Universe heard and responded to my request. The thing is though, what I asked for and what I truly wanted were not one and the same. And there in lies the rub. My request was fulfilled but I didn't order what I really wanted.

It's kind of like going to a restaurant. You read the menu and look over all the choices and listen to the server recite the specials and then you ponder what it is that sounds best to you and order that. But when the food is actually put in front of you, delicious though it is, you realize that even though the cod special sounded divine when you ordered it, you really would rather have had the salmon. I asked the Universe for the cod special last January and that is what I got. But you know what? I really wanted the salmon.

I have learned a couple things from this, the first being that the old adage really is true, you do have to be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. The second is that the law of attraction really does work but you need to be pretty specific about what it is that you want or you'll end up getting cod instead of salmon. And while cod is certainly good, it will NEVER be the salmon you really wanted. I'm going to figure out how to ask the Universe for my salmon and you can bet that I'm going to be darned careful how I ask for it. Because for all I know a year from now I could be blogging about how I thought I'd ordered salmon this time but it turned out I'd really ordered pork chops instead. And I don't eat pork.