Three Simple Steps: A Map to Success in Business and Life (18 page)

Another character trait that jumped out at me from the pages of the biographies of self-made men and women was their affiliations with nature. All of them turned to nature in times of stress or when big decisions needed to be made.

Henry Ford was passionate about walking in the country and reconnecting to nature. He encouraged workers to exercise in their off-hours and believed that next to work, it was a man’s duty to think. For his thinking time, he retreated to an old farmhouse near the Ford dairy in Dearborn. He sat on the ground when it was dry and in an old rocking chair when it was wet and simply let thoughts come to him. He shared his philosophy with Ralph Waldo Trine in a 1920s book titled
Power That Wins
. He offered this dictum: “Let every man think for himself. Let him call a conference for his powers, his common sense in the chair, his desire and knowledge of things as they are pleading the case before him.”

Emerson was another who attributed his success, and his sense of tranquility through it, to being at one with nature. He spent as much time walking in a forest as working in an office because that is where he found his inspiration.

To channel his restlessness, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s mother paid him to clear and plant an eight-acre field. In that solitude,
he came up with the ideas that made him a billionaire. John Jacob Astor, son of a German butcher, arrived in New York as a penniless immigrant. He became enchanted by the American wilderness and, within a year, was up the Hudson River making a living in the fur trade. In his biography, it is claimed that he imagined his future while daydreaming in the cool shadows of American oaks.

Harry’s craving for cigarettes was one of the things that changed my life because it forced me outdoors. I would arrive home from school and realize he had spent most of the day sitting in a closed room while smoking cigarettes and reading. The farmhouse had its original seventeenth-century walls, which retained generations of dampness. The only source of heat was a solitary coal fire in the hearth. It spewed gaseous fumes in all directions. My father smoked forty cigarettes a day, and the small room trapped a thick, blue, noxious haze. Above his armchair, yellow nicotine patches stained the ceiling.

It was like blowing smoke into an inflated balloon, and when I opened the door, a cloud of gas and smoke enveloped me. It did me no good to complain, so at every opportunity, I would escape that environment and head outdoors. The countryside air was like nectar by comparison. The nearest neighbor was a mile south, and I could walk north for five miles without seeing another person or breathing in anything but fresh air. To have such space at that age was liberating.

When it was warm, I walked barefoot across the fields. When it rained, I stood in streams to feel the gathering pace of the runoff. I walked in the woods and listened to all the sounds of falling leaves, dripping rain, and scurrying feet in the undergrowth. I began to understand how connected everything in the forest was. At first I felt like an intruder, but over time the noise ceased to be individual sounds and became a symphony, and the animals gradually accepted my presence. I learned to walk
stealthily, downwind of where wild animals foraged. I could stand still as a tree trunk and watch them for hours without them fearing me.

My siblings thought I had turned nerdy. Because I did not watch television in the domestic fog with them, my parents worried that I was becoming a loner. I simply preferred being outdoors to the choking environment of the lounge. There was no more intention behind it than that.

When I stayed out all evening, in rain or clear skies, everyone suspected that I was up to no good or had a secret girlfriend in the village. I was up to nothing more, however, than getting away from the pollution of the village house and street lamps, so as to take in the starry sky.

Odd things started to happen to me, things that I never mentioned to anyone at the time for fear of ridicule. I started to develop what I would call back then an extra-sensory perception. Today, I know it simply as my normal senses awakening through their reconnection with the unifying energy of nature, an experience available to everyone. Like the animals, I sensed a thunderstorm coming even when the sky was cloudless. I became aware of people’s presence before they stepped into a room. I knew when people were thinking or talking about me. I could physically feel it in my solar plexus and still do today.

My levels of concentration at school improved, and I played a higher level of sports. At school and at home, I would often offer an answer or comment to something that had not yet been spoken. “How did you know what I was thinking?” was a question I was commonly asked.

When circumstances kept me indoors, such as a day of torrential rain or a need to stay in to do homework, I noticed how my senses diminished, even after a day or two. My schoolwork deteriorated because I felt lethargic and sleepy in class. I performed less well on the soccer team. Within a few hours
of returning to nature, I felt refreshed. It became like a drug to me.

As I read more biographies, I noted the emphasis successful people placed on connecting to nature. George Washington Carver was a famous American scientist, educator, and inventor, best known for changing the direction of the American agricultural industry. He was born into slavery and all eleven of his siblings died at young ages. When slavery was abolished, black people were not allowed to go to the public schools. These barriers did not prevent Carver from educating himself. He went on to be an advisor to three American presidents and to promote racial harmony. His quote best describes the benefit of rewiring our network into nature at every opportunity:
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we only will tune in
.

Another benefit of being alone in open spaces when I was younger was that I could talk out loud, and no one would hear. When little children act out imaginary games, onlookers smile. When a teenager does it, parents send them to a psychologist. Adults get locked away. Imagination, however, is a key attribute for success. Everything I have achieved in my life was first played out in my mind’s eye, many of them during those early days of make-believe in the countryside.

North of the farmhouse, the landscape rose gently for several miles. The views from the brow of the hill extended in all directions and as far as the eye could see. Like a living scarecrow, a gnarled rowan tree stood in the center of a five-acre field. I spent hundreds of hours sitting under the protection of its branches, simply watching the view or reading an inspiring book.

Since then, I have always taken steps to stay energized by nature. I have lived in cities, apartment blocks, and suburbia, where nature’s presence is not as obvious. It is, however, still possible to connect with her in simple ways, by walking around
the block, sitting in a park, or walking along a canal. I think of it as a matrix into which we plug our neural networks. That gives us the opportunity to connect with a larger store of knowledge.

There are various modern definitions of the matrix, none of which satisfy the complexity of the subtle energy connections taking place when we commune with nature. Hollywood portrays it as humans electrifying an external reality run by dominant machines, which is not just incorrect but flat out backwards.

Early civilizations referred to Mother Earth as a matrix. They perceived people, animals, the earth, and the universe as unified, and achieved a symbiotic interconnection. That is the genuine matrix, and we need to plug our new neurons into it. We were, indeed, much closer to Mother Earth once, and making small, subtle attempts to get closer to her will enhance the benefits of Taking Quiet Time, because by plugging into nature’s matrix, your brain can access an expanded reservoir of knowledge just as a single computer can plug into the World Wide Web.

After taking quiet time for a while (I can’t say how long, as everyone is different), we find our perspective of the world shifts. As well as experiencing mental moments of brilliance, we feel less distant from others who were originally outside our environment of like-minded people. I find it hard to describe, but at the same time we feel more connected, while also feeling more individual. The picture I imagine is the connectedness a drop of rainwater, existing as an isolated system, still feels as part of the ocean from whence it came.

Our natural urge to criticize starts to diminish, and arguing seems like a waste of energy. What used to irritate us no longer feels as bothersome, and our emotions become more balanced.

People from our past might make contact again. There is an increase of what we currently regard as coincidences showing up in our lives. We could keep bumping into the same stranger in different places and yet not know why. We might be thinking of someone just before they call. Even if this already happens, we can be surprised how the incidences increase.

We then get urges to escape the urban concrete, and crave a walk in the country or a day at the beach. We want more plants in the office or to take greater care in the garden. These are signs of our new neurons seeking reconnection and that our subconscious is working with us to get plugged back into nature’s matrix. We ignore it at our peril.

If you have not been controlling your mentality before you start taking quiet time, your neurons will still seek reconnection. The danger, however, is that they will grab onto the fear and anxiety that media and people around you donate. This is why it is critical to use the three steps in the order written in this book.

Imagine you just took your first period of taking quiet time but are ignoring the importance of mentality control. It might not have been a complete success, but boy you felt good having a half hour to yourself. For a while there you actually stopped thinking. You don’t know why, but you felt energized after. Hope surged through you, and you went down to the kitchen with a spring in your step.

If you had been controlling your mentality, you might have chosen to put on an invisible mentality shield before the partner and kids descend. On this occasion, however, your mentality is still wide open. Chaos descends with the routine of a typical day. Your partner complains that you have not yet let the dog outside. In its excitement, the dog knocks a carton of milk off the table with its tail. Your child finds it funny, and your partner snaps at the child. Your thoughts are critical of the way your
partner handled the situation, and you make a note to speak to him or her later about it.

When you finally leave for work, you switch on the car radio, which is always tuned to your preferred news program, and it blurts out that the stock market plummeted in early trading due to concerns about an economic crash in Eastern Europe and heightened tensions in the Middle East. An image of your diminishing pension plan flashes in your head, and your stomach turns as you briefly question how you will ever afford college funds for the kids.

Right now, all those new neurons have been wired right back into the old mentality. The situation and the thought cause you to react. You drive off a little aggressively. A passing car blares its horn at you, and you react further by giving the finger only to realize it was a neighbor—the one who you always have words with over one thing or another. By now, and in less time than you spent taking it, the quiet time seems like a distant memory. Its benefits have gone.

What you could have done was simply to lower that mentality shield around yourself before you left your quiet place. You might have answered your partner’s jibe about the dog by simply smiling and taking the dog outside. Suddenly, you are connecting with nature. It does not matter where you are, there will be trees, grass, sky, birds, and fresh air. You will not even be aware of it, but your neurons will follow your attention. If you look at the sky and admire its color or the clouds or the wonderful feeling of raindrops on your skin, your neurons connect. If you smell a rose or touch a leaf, you immediately connect, however briefly, with nature. Through nature, you connect with everyone and everything.

When you get in the car, your radio is off because that day you decide you will take notice of the world around you instead of listening to all that doom and gloom. Your day is off to a
better start, and because your neurons are wiring in a different pattern, who knows what miracles and adventures are in store?

When we connect to nature’s matrix, it speeds up our rewiring, because we draw more energy through each new connection. Nature is electrified. Your physical and subtle bodies are an invigorated pattern of electromagnetic waves. When you reach out to touch something, whether a lover, a tree, or a blade of grass, a connection takes place, and vitality is exchanged.

Although most people cannot see or feel it, mini-explosions, like sparks, dance between them and anything they touch with one of their senses, and it works whether it is hearing, sight, smell, or touch.

Just as the quickest way to learn a new language is to move to a country where the populace speaks it, the best way to connect with the matrix is through immersion in nature.

Observing nature from a distance, such as through the window of a high-rise building, is like watching a bath being filled with water. It is no more than a vessel collecting fluid, but when you eventually immerse yourself in the warm, scented water, you get that wonderful
ahh
moment. Now you get it, the purpose of the bath. It is the same with nature. You have to be in it to get it.