SHHH! Be vewy vewy quiet!

For the first time in my life, I didn’t blab to everyone

If this is the first thing you’re reading, it might help to know that this is a serial set of stories in FIFO order. If you’re interested, you can start at the beginning of the main quest post list and work forward. Or not.

Academic research is a crazy thing to me. For one thing, no matter what the field, hairs get split finer and finer over time, presumably because the inhabitants of the field need to keep publishing. I am perennially gobsmacked by the esoteric stuff that gets researched and presented at academic conferences. Some people gobble that stuff up, but I’m not one of them.

For another thing, it seems like no part of life hasn’t been researched.  I find it maddening that familiar topics get examined down to a gnat’s ass and then wrapped up in mind-numbing verbiage. If anyone wanted to get top-secret intelligence from me (purely hypothetical), make me read academic papers. I wouldn’t be able to stand up to that torture for long.

Having gone on record with all that, I will now report that research that reaches back at least from the 1930s supports the notion of keeping one’s big goals to themselves, at least in the beginning. For various reasons, sharing a big goal promiscuously makes it more likely that it will not be achieved.

I didn’t need years of research to tell me to keep my mouth shut about creating my own Rivendell. My silence was rooted in my own experience and analysis. Still, it’s nice to know that my intuition was well grounded.

Part superstition, part knowing how people think

I chose not to share my plan to relocate to the Mendocino coast with anyone—well, with very very few people. This was the complete opposite from what I’d done before, meaning for my whole life up till then. For a long time, I held an unexamined assumption that sharing things I wanted to accomplish was a way to connect with other people. In my mind, sharing something near to my heart was a great way to deepen a relationship, as the other person could get a better understanding of what makes me tick.

This assumption held through the process of poring over all the other places I’d considered settling. This time, though, I uncharacteristically kept my mouth shut. Ten percent of my reason to keep mum was pure superstition—it seemed to me that talking about it was bad juju. It would anger the gods. It would jinx me.

The other 90 percent was knowing how people were likely to respond. I didn’t want to hear people’s reactions. I didn’t want to hear about their own experience, or that time some friend or relation went through relocation. I didn’t want to answer “how will you do this or that?” The longer I kept quiet, the more I realized that, in the past, sharing my goals had a negative effect on my motivation, my clarity, and my energy around the goal. I didn’t want this goal, so important to my spirit, to get sullied by the way I received others’ reactions.

No letting family members in on the plan. No sharing on social media. Though I had sent feelers out about rehoming the horses, I didn’t share the reason why. The only person who knew about the plan in the beginning was my best friend from high school. She was in the process of a planned relocation herself, plus she is a great listener and doesn’t add unnecessary shit into the space.

Then one day in May, I added one more person to the cone of silence: my Texas realtor.