Life Beyond Reason: A Memoir of Mania

This book is about what happens to us when we decide to create the lives we want in the face of every reason why we can’t. It’s about pursuing our dreams and passions and big ideas, and remaking ourselves and our lives from the inside out . It’s about how to face down impossible odds, and what to do when the only path to hope is hopeless.

And a whole lot of other things like that.

I wrote it because one Sunday afternoon I was kneading a batch of bread in my kitchen when I saw and heard a stage spectacle playing out in my head – set, lights, music, dancing, the whole thing.

My teenage daughter walks in. Gillian! I say. We could do a show that’s sort of a spiritual journey about these kids who have to overcome fear with courage and hope, so they…. My breath is short and my words come in bursts as I describe what I’m seeing and hearing as it flickers across my internal movie screen. We volley ideas like a table tennis match.

All that’s probably no big deal if you’re in showbiz, but I wasn’t. I was a lawyer, with no background in theater or film. Screenwriter and show producer had never shown up on a career aptitude test. They weren’t on my bucket list. The show just appeared out of nowhere that afternoon – unexpected, unanticipated, unplanned, and definitely unauthorized. Someone or Something had gotten inside my soul, picked up the remote, and switched my life to some new cosmic channel I wasn’t subscribed to.

The show wasn’t just a sweet little dance recital for my daughter to put on at her high school. It was Broadway and Cirque du Soleil combined: a big, bold, world-embracing show with a life-changing message. The whole thing was nuts, and I went nuts over it. It put a verve in me I’d never known.

Gillian and I sketched out a dramatic line and demo music, and I started cold-calling performing arts people, looking for someone to produce the show. A couple fruitless months and I was ready to bag the idea. There was outrage at home. The show was about not giving up; how can you give up on a show about not giving up?

I booked three days at a silent retreat center, feeling fractured, scattered, indecisive, intimidated. I brought headphones and punctured the silence with our demo soundtrack. By the evening of the second day it was obvious: I was going to produce the show. The skies cleared; ambivalence and indecision vanished; I made lists, drove home, got to work.

I thought I had decided to take on a creative project. I was wrong. Instead, I had decided that my life would change forever.

I never saw it coming.

Turns out it’s always this way when life as you know it ends. You think you can envision what will rise in its place, but you can’t, not really. And you can’t get there from here; you need a whole new you to do a whole new thing.

I know that now; I didn’t know it then. Then, I was still a respectable lawyer running a respectable law firm making a respectable living in a respectable community. That very competent persona took a sudden, unannounced leave of absence when the show unpacked its bags, leaving someone possessed in charge.

That would be me, launched without my knowledge on a personal Hero’s Journey, complete with monsters, ordeals, and magic elixirs. The particular challenges of my quest included a midlife reinvention, a new business startup, a financial crash and burn, and a personal awakening. Any of those alone would have been enough; taken altogether, they were my undoing.

And my remaking.

Throw in a couple major accidents two years apart, with fractures and hospital stays and drawn-out rehab, and when all was said and done, I was broken and broke.

Now that, I wasn’t prepared for.

A couple years into the process, I started writing –collecting my thoughts, trying to make sense of something that made no sense. In time, two moments of awareness turned that collection of thoughts into a book.

First, it became clear that my story wasn’t just about me. Countless other people had gone this way, and I’d met a bunch of them – in person and in books. They became my tour guides and fellow travelers. We were all in this together. I wasn’t as alone and weird as I’d thought. I had written as Everyman – not just my story, but the story of many. I hadn’t experienced anything that wasn’t already widely known.

Second, I learned that I had in fact been possessed when I decided to produce the show – possessed by that particular kind of madness that overtakes us in our moments of greatest inspiration. People who study the human brain call it mania, and if you’re feeling inspired, it could happen to you, too. In fact, chances are good that, if you’ve been drawn to this book in that strange and wonderful way that books find us, it already has.

Put those two things together, and the riddle was solved, hindsight made sense of things. It was a Eureka moment, and I wanted to share it.

I was also wary of doing so. Life had spilled a lot of goo all over me, and I didn’t want to cause unnecessary mess. I needed to know there was value in what I had to say. I started taking my ideas public: I wrote a blog, conducted interactive workshops, offered my help as a mentor and coach, shared the unpublished manuscript, and generally tested the ideas in countless coffee shop conversations. (If you like, you can read the reviews and evaluations I’ve gotten from those activities on my website.)

Several years of that, and I was convinced it was safe to tell my story. Which is maybe the ultimate irony. My story wasn’t anywhere even close to being safe. There’s nothing logical, sensible, prudent, or reasonable about it. Yours won’t be either, if you go this way. But in the end, we’ll both have a story to tell, and it will be worth it – so worth it, it will be laughable and irrelevant to say so.

Only by then it won’t be just a story. It will be a legend.

Introduction:

Follow Your Mania

This book doesn’t promise fame or fortune, and for a long time that bothered me. Besides crushing the remnants of an ego I thought was already rubble enough, it was obvious that my exclusion from the Exalted Assembly of Successful Self-Help Writers Who Successfully Write About Success would be permanently sealed if I couldn’t deliver world domination. In the end, the book went ahead without it.

Bummer. I really wanted into that club.

This book has memoir in the subtitle, but it’s really an audience participation event. It needs you to be overtaken with inspiration, so that you decide to reinvent yourself, make a dream come true, live with passion, or otherwise bring radical change into your world. It needs you to commit to the simple idea that something else is possible for you, and then courageously launch yourself toward making it happen.

Part One, Inspiration, invites you to start. We all have the same reasons for sticking with the status quo. We need strong energy to break out. Inspiration changes our energy, gets us going. It parades out all the familiar reasons Why Not, and invites us to launch anyway.

Part Two, Perspiration, takes on the Resistance with a capital R we always run into when we move boldly toward what we want. We think Resistance is a personal problem but it’s not: it’s a human being problem; we all face the same obstacles to our big ideas. Turns out most of them come from within ourselves, and that’s where we need to look if we want to make progress. Part Two helps you do that.

Inspiration and Perspiration are about creating change, and they take us a long way, but there’s more. Eventually our ticket is punched all the way to personal transformation.

Part Three, A Comedy of Errors, is that blurry transitional space between change and transformation. The move from change to transformation isn’t linear, it’s shift. The work of change is largely about remodeling our internal rules and living by new ones. The work of transformation is about realizing there are no rules anymore, we’re just making it all up.

If you don’t understand what I just said, you will, once you get there. When you do, Part Four, Transformation, will throw a friendly arm around your shoulders and invite you outside to look up at the billions of galaxies that shine on your new existence. Maybe you’ll look up and marvel, and maybe you’ll wonder what that has to do with anything. Probably you’ll do both.

Which is another thing it’s useful to know about this book: each section reflects the awareness and understanding I had at the time I wrote it; I didn’t go back and rewrite it from an integrated hindsight point of view. That’s why, after you pass through Inspiration and Perspiration and arrive at Transformation, it feels like the book just went somewhere brand new. It feels that way because that’s what actually happened to me.

The same shift will happen to you, too, if you get that far, and I really hope you do.

But first we need to get started. How about it?

In the Beginning

In the beginning, there is inspiration.

Inspiration ignites us. It is both fuel and fire, the match that strikes and the blaze that bursts.

Inspiration thrills us with new passions and possibilities, shocks our unused neural pathways into unaccustomed life. It shakes us awake in the dead of night, urges us to our feet and outside to gaze into deep space. It plays a new tune on a new instrument, until our long submerged essence resonates with a new boldness, stunned at the robustness of its own long-silenced voice.

Inspiration invades our numbed lives, overwhelms our defenses, disconnects our habitual sense of what is normal and possible, detaches our allegiances to status quo. One minute we had an ironclad case for The Way Things Are; the next we’re tearing it down. One minute we were drifting and purposeless; the next we have a cause to throw down for.

Inspiration’s days are glory days. We revel in their freedom, joy, and passion. These are days of newness and discovery, celebration and vigor, days of wildness and courage and daring, the sweeping dive of new love, the dizzy freshness of everything that’s good about life.

Inspiration is our beginning. It is also our destination – the shining new reality we will inhabit when our idea unites with our hope. What we see and think and feel when inspiration first greets us is what we’ll see and think and feel on the grand and glorious day when we finally arrive where inspiration calls us to go.

Without inspiration, we wouldn’t create at all. At its core is this one idea: something else is possible…and because it is, everything must move aside to make room for it.

And therein lie the seeds of its particular kind of madness.

Mania

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Kahn

Wild-eyed and unkempt, staggering under the weight of eternity, mumbling ecstatic rantings… either the guy’s off his meds, or he’s in touch with reality at a different level than the rest of us. Is he a prophet? A creative visionary? It’s hard to tell. Most prophets and visionaries of any kind – religious or otherwise – are considered crazy until history and hindsight prove them otherwise. We can never tell at the time.

People like that are possessed of a special state of mind called mania. When we’re in it, life has a heightened sense of meaning and purpose, serendipity and synchronicity rule the day, and everything in and around us is an amazing unified oneness – perfect, whole, and complete. It’s the place where auspicious connections are easily made, where imagination makes visions and dreams come true.

Neuroscientists locate that state of mind in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. That’s where the brain tells us all is well, where all of our perceptions come together into a meaningful whole, in a happy stew of the