[In this series of posts, I want to introduce you to a certain idea, metaphor, and reality: The International Bohemian Highway. Millions of people who do not fit comfortably into a conventional life are fellow travelers on this highway. I hope that this series of posts paints a picture that resonates for you. If you’d like to meet some of your fellow travelers, please come join my new Eric Maisel Community.]
As a young man, I spent all of 1974 traveling through Europe. Iceland, Ireland, England, the Netherlands, France, Hungary … all the usual and unusual suspects. During my six weeks in Ireland, I acquired a girlfriend—that was lovely. I was pulled off the night train, passing through some Soviet bloc country in the dead of night, and questioned as to what sort of “writer” I was—that was less lovely. (And the books I had with me, probably Eric Ambler spy novels, were confiscated.) In Paris, there was a moment in a museum café … well, you get the idea. It was a year spent on the International Bohemian Highway, breathing, looking, eating cheap caviar in Budapest, learning about class in London (I was not of the right class), and looking generally outlandish in my purple parka.
It was a year in a dream state. We are hungry for that dream state, which is almost impossible to acquire nowadays, with so much unavoidable noise, so much tumult, so much activity, so much to do. No meditation practice or walk in nature can produce that place of deep dreaming, that month-long reverie on nothing in particular, as your train passes through Communist East Germany and men with dogs examine you and your fellow travelers pull out sausages and pickles and you fall asleep dreaming about who-knows-what, but of course with a novel percolating.
I am hoping that our new community serves us a little in this regard: that it supports this dreaming. Not the dreaming of Jung, that leads to a mandala, or the dreaming of Freud, that makes you wonder if a cigar is a cigar, or the dreaming of cognitive scientists, curious about which part of the brain is firing as you think about pancakes, but the dreaming of … artists. Any sort of artist, even—maybe especially—the spectacularly strange ones. When were you last the spectacularly strange artist you might have been? When have you dreamed a month way, crossing from Buda to Pest and from Pest to Buda over a bridge that has seen just about everything? When did you last experience that sort of dream?
Can we have that in the new Eric Maisel Community? Could be. Who knows. (I am guessing that you are now humming Something’s Coming from West Side Story.) Life without that dream is a rat race. With it, it can be spectacular. We begin in October. Come grab your annual membership now.
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Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt: A Toolkit for Thriving in a Chaotic World (Personal Growth, Self Development)
Make Your Gifted Life Meaningful
Overcome your unique challenges. The challenges smart and creative people encounter―from scientific researchers and genius award winners to bestselling novelists, Broadway actors, high-powered attorneys, and academics―often include anxiety, overthinking, mania, sadness, and despair. In Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt, psychology specialist and creativity coach Dr. Eric Maisel draws on his many years of work with the best and the brightest to pinpoint these often devastating challenges and offer solutions based on the groundbreaking principles and practices of natural psychology.
Find meaningful success. Do you understand what meaning is, what it isn’t, and how to create it? Do you know how to organize your day around meaning investments and meaning opportunities? Are you still searching for meaning after all these years? Many smart people struggle with reaching for or maintaining success because, after all of the work they put into attaining it, it still seems meaningless. In Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt, Dr. Maisel teaches you how to stop searching for meaning and create it for yourself.
In Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt, you will find:
- You are not alone in your struggles with living in a world that wasn’t built for you or your intelligence
- Logic- and creativity-based strategies to cope with having a brain that goes into overdrive at the drop of a hat
- Questions that help you create your own personal roadmap to a calm and meaningful life
Readers of true, natural self-help books for gifted people struggling with life, anxiety, and depression, like Living With Intensity, Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults, or Your Rainforest Mind, will learn how to create meaning in their lives with Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
