by Cynthia Sue Larson

On New Year's day my daughter asked me: "Mom? Can we go to the toy store today?" She and her friend were thrilled to have stuffed enough dollar bills and coins into a glass jar to pay for a doll house they'd been longing for. They phoned Toys-R-Us and confirmed it was open, so my daughters and their girlfriend and I piled into the car. When we arrived, I realized we should have also asked if they had any doll houses in stock; we couldn't find any in the store at all.

Since the girls had pooled their money for months, we didn't feel like giving up so easily. I found a sales clerk and asked her, "Would you please phone the nearest Toys-R-Us store and ask if they have any doll houses in stock?" The clerk agreed, so we stood together patiently as she waited on hold. After fifteen minutes, the girls became restless, so I thanked the sales clerk and told her we'd just drive to the other store. The clerk told me that none of the three different employees she had spoken to at the other toy store had succeeded in finding any doll houses.

As we drove for about twenty minutes down the freeway, I asked the children to feel love in their hearts for their doll-house-to-be, and to visualize it waiting for us at the next store. My daughter's friend chimed up from the back seat, "I'd like to have at least THREE doll houses to choose from." I smiled and nodded as I drove, feeling a bit skeptical that the store could have that many doll houses so well hidden from three different sales clerks who had just been looking for them.

I parked the car and entered the second Toys-R-Us feeling cautiously hopeful. I asked the first employee we met if she knew where the doll houses were, and she directed us to the doll section where we found only a demonstration model of the doll house. My daughter and her friend looked disappointed, yet we still didn't want to give up.

I found another employee working in the doll department of the store, and asked her to search the store's inventory for the doll house, pointing at the demonstration model. She walked over to her computer, and typed in the doll house identification number, before giving us the bad news. "We don't have any of these doll houses currently in the store or in the warehouse right now, but new inventory should be arriving in about three weeks. You can check back then."

I sighed, and returned to relay the message to the girls. We finally "let go" of our expectation of finding a doll house that day, and trudged over to the stuffed toys to browse there for a while. My younger daughter found a stuffed toy she adored, so I accompanied her to the check-out register to purchase it while the others remained in the stuffed toy section. We made our purchase quickly, and as we walked back to the stuffed toy section I was flabbergasted to see a shelf of several doll houses! I walked briskly toward my daughter and her friend and enthusiastically called out, "I found them! They have doll houses!"

We all rushed back to the doll houses, and were delighted to see there were four doll houses to choose from, just as my daughter's friend had hoped. When we "let go" of our visualization, we gave our dream the degrees of freedom necessary to exist unobserved as pure energy waves. Our observation that, "They have doll houses!" collapsed the wave functions (what Fred Alan Wolf calls "popping the qwiff"), and one possibility materialized in which doll houses were for sale in the store.

I found a wonderful message in this experience. Our lives can turn out beautifully for us when we simply allow reality to surprise us. Things are not always what they seem, and sometimes giving up and letting go is necessary before reality can rearrange itself to make our dreams come true. As Dottie Walters once said, "Failure? I never encountered it. All I ever met were temporary setbacks."

When we detach ourselves from the specifics on our path in life, we can find meaning and significance even in the roadblocks and stumbling stones we meet along the way. Failure is impossible when love flows through our hearts.

© Cynthia Sue Larson, November, 2000

Cynthia Sue Larson holds a bachelor's degree in physics from UC Berkeley (1982), earned in conjunction with her pursuit of a more complete understanding of reality. Following completion of her MBA degree in 1984, she worked as a project manager at Citibank for seven years at the California Data Center. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Reality Shifts: When Consciousness Changes the Physical World.

Cynthia writes articles for Magical Blend and Parabola magazines, and Enlightenment.com, Conscious Creation Journal, and Themestream on the internet about reality shifts. She teaches reality shifting workshops, and has been interviewed by Elliot Stein for his Stein Online talk show, and Charles Grotsky on the Technology Trends television show. Cynthia's passion is helping people realize how we all create reality, and that we can consciously improve our lives and the world around us to make our favorite dreams come true. Check out Cynthia's website, where you can subscribe to her fascinating (free!) RealityShifters News monthly ezine.