Conversations For Transformation: Essays Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

Conversations For Transformation

Essays By Laurence Platt

Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard

And More




Hello! How Are Things Going For You?

Cowboy Cottage, East Napa, California, USA

October 28, 2010



This essay, Hello! How Are Things Going For You?, is the eighteenth in an open group Encounters With A Friend:
  1. Showing Up
  2. Poet Laureate
  3. A Man In The Crowd
  4. Real Men Cry
  5. A Different Set Of Rules
  6. Nametag: A True Story
  7. Half-Life
  8. Waiting On You
  9. Erotica On Schedule
  10. A House On Franklin Street
  11. NeXT
  12. Reflection On A Window
  13. Here And There
  14. How To Enroll The World
  15. Demonstration
  16. Two Of Me II: Confirmation Not Correction
  17. Holiday Spectacular
  18. Hello! How Are Things Going For You?
  19. Regular Guy
  20. A Scholar And A Gentleman
  21. Images Of You
  22. With Nothing Going On
  23. Where No One Has Gone Before
  24. Attachment: Causeway Between Islands
  25. If You're Not Then Don't
  26. Images Of You II
  27. Living Where Life Is
  28. Create Me The Way I Am
  29. How Do You Spell The Sound A Ratchet Makes?
  30. You Don't Ask "Why Me?"  When It's Raining II
  31. The Stink Of Zen
  32. Sitting Quietly In A Room Alone
  33. Footsteps On Metal Stairs
so far, in that order.




I Thank You for asking.

I've returned to the Cowboy Cottage from ten days in Madrid visiting with my daughter Alexandra. My relationship with Alexandra comes from a place of deep joy and unbridled love. It's the space which validates and completes and fulfills all  relationships. It especially  validates and completes and fulfills all family  relationships: both the family I was born into, as well the family born from me. It inspires me. It moves me. During this visit Alexandra represented me to her friends as the source of Conversations For Transformation, and as your Friend. I didn't request she do this. I've never requested she do this. Hearing it coming spontaneously from her was huge. I've already booked flights for our next visit together in Morocco in March 2011.

My eldest son Christian has started his first year studying engineering at UC Santa Barbara. On the day Christian was born I promised him I would pay his college tuition. At the time I didn't have a clue  how I would fulfill this promise. It was, literally, an impossible  promise. Now he's at college, relishing in his freshman year (in pretty much the same way as I relished in my freshman year), and the freedom it is from his past, and the clearing  it is for his future. And somewhere along the way just in the process of Life itself  my promise to him got fulfilled.

My youngest son Joshua is in his junior year at high school. Watching Joshua, the youngest of my three children, growing up and becoming increasingly independent of me is bittersweet. But at the same time it's also rich  because through my relationship with Joshua I've gotten to fully understand and appreciate my father's relationship with me as I was growing up and distancing myself from him when I was Joshua's age - just as Joshua's doing with me now.

The thing about my relationship with Alexandra and my relationship with Christian and my relationship with Joshua is it's the same thing as with all  my relationships: they all come from  transformation. There's no other way I live or want to live. What's truly great is the people who know me (that is to say, the people who really  know me) tell me this works  for them. All my relationships honor it. If I'm attractive to people, it's because what they get from me (and sometimes may not even know they get from me) is I'm consistent with them, I'm consistent with who I really am, and I'm congruent  with transformation. People love that about people. Of course we do. It's entirely appropriate we would.

You asked me a most wonderful question not so long ago which I'd like to revisit now since in the interim, I've had some insight into it. You asked me "Are you getting laid?". It wasn't just the question which was wonderful even as it caused me to blink in surprise ("I can't believe you asked me that!"  I thought). It was the way you asked it. It was completely devoid of intonation. It wasn't boy talk. It was as bland as "Did you have oats for breakfast this morning?". Noticing my blinking in surprise made me realize I seldom tell the truth about sex. It made me realize I'm covert  about sex. The truth is I'm crazy  about sex - or at least the machinery  is crazy about sex. When I give over to the machinery  while at the same time not relinquishing my responsibility for it, sex works. And the thing I'm clearest about is anything I do and whomever I do it with comes from  transformation and that's  why it works - there's no need for me to fret my attention on it working nor on it not  working. All I need to do is stop being covert about it.

My financial situation is good. By "good" I mean "solid", "no scarcity". I'm paying all my bills on time and I'm meeting all my financial responsibilities and commitments with even a few dollars left over to invest for myself and with which to be generous with my children and causes I support like the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. I'm living very well, managing my finances ruthlessly, and doing what I love.

With regards to generating these Conversations For Transformation, I'm getting very good at this - to put it mildly. I can powerfully create the space of transformation, possibility, and enrollment out of recreating you, and then I can write something which brings the experience forth for people. Actually my writing is only secondary. What's primary and paramount to me is the experience it inspires people with: You. In sharing your work this way with about eight hundred people a week given two essays a week, I discover facets of the multifacted Self like priceless flecks in the seams of the rock deep down in a gold mine. I would never have gotten this deep and this valued without the discipline of generating these Conversations For Transformation with you. I don't need to write them into a book, and I may. I don't need to have them generate money, and I may. Conversations For Transformation are perfect the way they are. I have no real incentive and even less intention to change the format in which they're currently delivered free via the internet. "If they ain't broke, don't fix 'em!". And they ain't broke. They work. They're you. That's my intention realized.

You're always with me. You always are. Always. It's effortless. I miss being with you. This never goes away. In spite of it, knowing you're in the world doing what you're doing inspires me and drives me to share the exuberance which comes with knowing you. This never goes away either. I'm living into a future given by participating with you for the rest of my life. Sometimes it's enormously frustrating to me that I can't get  what that looks like in actuality. I think if I was totally certain  of what it would look like in actuality, I could more surely make it happen. So I'm just living into it like an abstract, like a possibility, and will continue to do so. I'll check in with you from time to time and stay on purpose.

Thank You for Everything. Thank You for the Gift you are. Thank You for being the way Life shows up for me. Thank You for putting language to it. Thank You for bringing Love to it. I Love You with Everything I got. It's the most thrilling, the most exciting, the most validating, the most authentic way I can muster to be used up by my time on this planet. I intend to continually and ongoingly presence our relationship and carry it profoundly into the future. I intend to continually and ongoingly presence our relationship and carry it profoundly into the future out here in the world  because "out here in the world" is the only place I can think of where it can be of any good at all.

This is what I do. And this is what I do because this is what I do. There's no other ulterior motive. It's enough just being in this conversation with you. And for me, being in this conversation with you this way is a privilege. Nothing less, nothing more.

I Thank You for this privilege.



Communication Promise E-Mail | Home

© Laurence Platt - 2010 through 2022 Permission