Hosea's log: Star date 1992-10-11 ... or it might have been 1992-11-10. It was well into the autumn of 1992, and right around the full moon—maybe plus or minus a day. No more than a day.
People who are comfortable with what might be called the woo-woo end of New Age spirituality sometimes talk about "releasing intentions into the Universe." It's not always clear how this differs either from prayer or from magic, but the language is vague enough to offer plausible deniability if one is challenged by a hard-core materialist. "Oh no, I wasn't doing anything supernatural. I was just focusing my attention on a certain goal for the sake of psychological clarity."
The thing is, sometimes it works. Debbie once told me that a few months before she and I met up again after twenty years, she found herself getting tired of living alone after her divorce, and released an intention into the Universe that she meet someone romantically. Then she met me.
Normally I'm not really organized enough to do the same thing, but I remember one time that I definitely did. It was a long-term intention; and while I didn't follow up scrupulously to check every bit of it against a schedule, in the long run it did more or less come true as well.
The time was 1992. I was working a contract job nearly 120 miles from home—by which I mean the apartment I shared with Wife, while she was in graduate school. I drove down on Monday morning and back on Friday evening. During the week I stayed with my parents, which was just a little over 40 miles away from my work. The traffic was terrible, and I wasn't making a lot: enough to pay our rent, but not enough to keep up with Wife's already-riotous spending. But it was what I could get, and all that driving didn't leave me a lot of time to look for a better job.
For some years I had still nursed fantasies of going back to graduate school myself. I had left abruptly (as I describe briefly here) and my faculty advisor was kind enough to hold open my space in my fellowship program for one year. Well, by this time it had been closer to six years, and I wasn't still in touch with him. But I still clung to the fantasy that maybe someday I could go back.
Then in the fall of 1992 I learned that my former faculty advisor had died. Of course there was no realistic way that I would ever have gone back, but this shattered my fantasy. I wept for him—by which of course I mean "for myself and my lost dreams"—harder than I have ever wept for a dead relative. And then, not long after, I found myself walking out to the parking lot after another long day, after sunset, with the stars twinkling, and the most enormous full moon hanging just over the horizon.
You know that when I first met Wife, she was Wiccan. At this point she still was—her flirtation with Christianity was still many years in the future. So I had long since gotten used to her invocations of the Moon during ritual. I wasn't about to do anything so formal out in my employer's parking lot, in the industrial section of a big city. But as I ambled towards my car, I did start to talk quietly to the Moon.
At the time I was 30 years old, almost 31. So I must have been primed to think in terms of nice, round decades. In any event, my thoughts went something like this. "I'm sick of this. I'm sick of working so far from home. I'm sick of never having enough money. And I'm sick of doing work that I don't find meaningful. Here's what I want instead. Within the next year, I want a job closer to home, so I don't have to drive a hundred miles each way. By the time I'm 40, I want to be out of debt. By the time I'm 50, I want to be worth a million dollars. And by the time I'm 60, I want to be able to quit work permanently and do something fun."
Then I got in my car and drove away. And at the time I figured that would be the end of the story. But ....
🌟 In January of the next year, I started a job just a few miles from home. No more hundred-mile drives, and no more camping out with my parents. (It so happens that this was the job where I first met Debbie, though at the time we were just co-workers, and then just-good-friends.)
🌟 By the time I was 40, I wasn't out of debt in any literal sense because I owned a house and had a mortgage on it. And yes, Wife continued to spend money. But the house appreciated after we bought it, and we got the debt to a place where it could be managed as a matter of routine.
🌟 By the time I was 50, ... well, I don't know exactly what I was worth. There had been a surge in housing prices a little earlier—by the time I was 44, our house may have been worth between $800,000 and $900,000, though it soon dropped from that peak to something lower. But even though it was worth a lot less than it had been at the peak, it was still worth more than twice what we had paid for it.
🌟 Shortly before I turned 52, Wife and I sold the house and went our separate ways. I spent my proceeds on school for the boys. Wife spent hers on whatever she spent it on ... though I think that mostly means spending it on a living situation that was outside of her price range.
🌟 Right about the time I was 60, my longtime job with BigCompany ended. And, as you know, I have been able to retire.
So to summarize. Of the four intentions I discussed that night with the Moon, the first and fourth came to pass exactly as stated. For the second and third I'm not so sure if they ever happened at a literal level, but the problems that they were meant to address faded into the background and just became part of the texture of normal life.
That's not a bad record.
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