Easily lost and essential, this is the power that makes difficult things possible– the calm, patient force that facilitates the organization of chaos, enables the overcoming of great obstacles.   Try doing a stunt requiring coordination, creativity and daring without the necessary calm and witness how easily the neck can be broken.

Simba Perkins, at eight or nine, seeing his third grade teacher, me, about to get into his car, calls out and waves, balanced on a railing four feet above the cement.   Without any hesitation, and to my horror as I see what he’s about to do and hold out my hand to stop him from forty feet away, he springs backwards into the air, flips neatly upside down and with his head pointed straight at the deadly concrete, whips his body, catlike as Bruce Lee and lands lightly on his feet.  I exhale, smile, get into my car and drive off, impressed as hell even now, twenty years later.

A friend has long been working on an idea that could become a very engaging and interesting TV series.   He comes up with a solution to a long-running impediment– how the characters all meet in the first place and come to interact.   The elusive organizational device that will set his idea into motion week after week.   He excitedly describes his breakthrough to his wife.  His wife tells him it’s a stupid idea.

I laugh when he tells me this.  “What the fuck does she know?” I ask him, telling him I think the idea is ingenious, which it is.  He laughs too, because, truly, his practical and brilliant wife doesn’t know shit about this particular thing– creating something wholly from one’s imagination.   He tells me her comment stopped him in his tracks and he was unable to move the idea forward for days after she told him it was a stupid idea.

Today, in Costco, a friend who worries about my lack of business savvy, of worldly success, of my proven history of dreaming, spinning out ideas and talking a great game without actually ever getting paid for any of it, does the same thing to me that this guy’s wife did to him.   He certainly had no intention of doing it, but here’s how it’s done.

I’m Simba Perkins, standing on a railing, about to do the Bruce Lee backflip.  This guy is me, but instead of helplessly gesturing hesitation from 40 feet away, manages to make a superhuman leap and grab an ankle as I take off, trying to prevent my idiot backflip and frantically talking sense to me as he lunges.  “You can’t do it on concrete!  You’ll get paralyzed for life!”  Only the lunge and ankle grab don’t manage to save me, and his worst fears for me come true.

“I’m the guy,” he says, putting himself in the place of the powerful executive he’s managed to get me a business meeting with “and I have no idea what you’re talking about, exactly.”

So I calm myself, in my sleeplessness in a strange house where I’m taking care of yet another lonely dog for someone who’s away.  Here’s what I’m talking about, exactly.  You set up a business meeting for me with a very powerful and accomplished producer, entrepreneur, billionaire.  You want to know how I will pitch it.  I’m walking in Costco when we speak and I tell you over the phone that I will keep it short and sweet, describe my program in sixty to ninety seconds, show him a clip or two and ask him for his ideas.

“That’s too general, you should ask him something specific, as we discussed,” you say.

“I will tell him at this point, as I expand and try to fund the program, that I am looking for people with the expertise to help me get it to the next stage of development.   I know there are experts who can tell me the best ways to do things now that will take me months or years to learn on my own.  I will learn to do these things, as I’ve learned everything that’s taken the program this far, but a couple of people who know business, outreach, recruitment, funding and so forth would be a huge help and speed things up greatly.”

“I have no idea what you just said,” he tells me, “and I’ve been there with you from the beginning on this project.”

What I hear is the opposite of soothing calmness.  I hear, “why do you think you can do this spontaneously with an important stranger when you can’t even do it with an old friend?”  “you’re not ready”  “your presentation is going to fall flat”  “you’re going to embarrass me and my painter friend who set this meeting up” “you really don’t know the first thing about business meetings with busy billionaires” “you’re being cavalier” “I don’t think you’ll make a coherent pitch without a carefully crafted speech, in writing and memorized”  “did you even think of what you might possibly want from him?  We talked about this a week ago? have you given it no thought?”  “why are you so determined to fail?”  “why do you imagine you’ll be quick on your feet in this high pressure business meeting with a very busy and successful man when you just failed at improvising it coherently with me as you walk through Costco?”  “Why won’t you let me help you?”

Here’s why I imagine I’ll be quick on my feet in this high pressure business meeting with a very busy and successful man.  I speak well and am quick on my feet, I know the program and its philosophy intimately, can present it quickly and show the man charming examples of what I’m talking about.  I can also give the man as much detail as he likes.  I don’t see this as the high pressure business situation that it also is.   I’m playing with house money, there is truly nothing lost if this chap doesn’t see the point of the program, there is a fantastic upside if he gets it.  If he’s excited by the program I don’t need more than that– he will find a way to help.  If he doesn’t like it, the best script in the world won’t sell it to him.    I can explain and evoke it.  He will get it or not.  What do you not understand about this?

“I don’t understand anything you just said,” you will say, and I will smile, imagining I am not in a strange apartment, sleepless and far from my toys, but where I always am when I dream– in exactly the right place for blessings to fall gently on me like soft rain on a flower in Sekhnet’s garden.  

Rather than, bien sur, writing this to nobody at 4:53 a.m. to calm myself enough to sleep, instead of being up to have breakfast with old friends a mile away who are up and at ’em at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday because they are up and at ’em, baby.

Figures a do-nothing dreamer would sleep til noon, doesn’t it?  Couldn’t he dream just as well from 11 to 7?  No doubt, no doubt about that.