I thought about this last night during an unexpected visit with Katharine Hepburn being interviewed by Barbara Walters. They dropped by via the VCR out of an old stack of videocassettes I keep for emergency TV.

You see, I used to tape stuff and forget to identify it. Now, years later, it’s a little like having a pantry full of canned goods with the labels gone. Definitely potluck. But I like the mini-thrill of not knowing who’ll show up on my screen, yet sure it’ll be someone worthwhile. Last night’s can of soup served up an ancient 20/20 interview filmed shortly before Hepburn died.

A true eccentric, Kate revealed her distaste for closets, preferring to keep all her clothes visible and laid out on a bed. But the part of the interview that caught my attention came toward the end.

Barbara leaned toward her guest in that let’s-get-intimate way she’s known for and asked, “Are you ever in doubt?”

“Practically always,” Kate said.

“Yet you’re so definite.”

“Yes, I am. You might as well be,” Kate answered with a regal certitude that even the uncontrollable body tremors she inherited from her grandfather couldn’t shake.

“But inside you’re really not sure. It’s just outside?” Barbara asked, doubtfully. Then she leaned back, a startled expression on her face, and said, almost accusingly: “You have influenced my life. I have believed everything you ever said, and now you tell me you’re not really sure, at this late date?”

Like Barbara, I’d like to believe some people are totally clear about what they’re doing. That way, there’d be some hope for a doubtless me in the future.

At the same time, I used to think there was something good, something useful about doubt. I imagined a doubt-free world as chaos, full of people running roughshod over each other with their unalterable convictions. But I’ve changed my mind. Doubt, especially the kind turned inward, destroys.

Anyway, how can anything that feels so awful be healthy? My dictionary says doubt means “to hold questionable, hesitate to believe, to distrust.” But I look to the obsolete definition for the deep truth. Doubt used to mean “to fear or dread.”

Awhile back, another TV interviewer asked Steven Spielberg if, after producing so many successful movies, he ever worried about failing. “Always,” he said. “In fact, every morning when I go to work I doubt that I can pull it off.” I remember Johnny Carson, too, saying he’d never once walked out to do a monologue without stage fright. Just another name for doubt.

Doubt is the fear that we can’t pull it off, that nothing will show up for us, that we’ll fail this time for sure. It plagues me every time I sit down to write.

We learn to doubt ourselves as children through countless little incidents that erode confidence. I remember writing an essay in fifth grade about why I was glad to be an American. Proud that it was selected for submission to a local contest, I brought it home. My father read it aloud, laughing the whole time (maybe at how sure I was of my convictions). It probably was funny, as kid’s stuff often is, but I hadn’t intended it to be. Mortified, I wanted to crawl under the dining table and pull the chairs in after me.

Now I agree with the wise man who told me doubt is a lie. It’s false certainty, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Doubt pretends to question, but it’s already judged you. Coming from a place of fear, doubt stops everything cold, closes down the “third eye” (intuition, guidance, perception), and kills anything new.

“What’s needed,” he said, “is curiosity. If you let doubt signal a need to know what’s true, space opens for an inquiry to find out.”

I liked that, so I began to answer my doubt with “I wonder,” as in “if this isn’t right, I wonder what is?” I discovered that something new, often surprising, always shows up in the presence of wonder. Maybe a fresh direction or a hot idea or a creative solution.

Then I got curious about “wonder” itself, and my dictionary revealed three distinct meanings:

1. To speculate about curiously
2. To be filled with admiration, amazement, awe
3. A miracle

So, to wonder is to question curiously, which opens the way for amazement at finding a miracle.

Beats doubt by a long shot.

“What I want,” she said, as though the words themselves were dangerous, “is to know what I want.”

She proceeded to list all the things she did not want, including her secretarial job, being fifteen pounds “too chubby,” and living at home with her parents.

When she wound down, I threw out the obvious: “So, what do you want?”

Startled, as though she hadn’t expected the question outright, she drew back and gripped her hands in her lap. “I don’t know,” she said.

I waited.

After awhile she said, “Maybe this therapy isn’t such a good idea after all.”

Again, I waited.

“It doesn’t really matter.”

More waiting.

“It’s not possible.”

Silence.

“I probably can’t, anyway.”

Nothing.

Finally, in exasperation, as though she thought me too slow-witted to comprehend anyway, she yelled: “I want to be a rock star!”

“Sounds good to me,” I shouted back.

How come it’s so dangerous to say what we want? After all, it’s a natural act. Kids do it all the time.

As adults, though, it’s risky business to tell the truth about what we want, for two reasons:

1. We’re afraid we can’t have it.
2. We’re afraid we can.

If we imagine we can’t have it, we’re left to deal with all the feelings of undeservability, disappointment, and limitation with which we surround ourselves.

If we decide we can have it, we’re forced to face up to actually doing what it would take to make it happen.

What a rotten double bind. So, what to do? Well, the wise thing, of course. We pretend not to know. Or, we decide not to want anything at all.

Sounds good. In fact, some of us make a case for this as a major step toward enlightenment. Pointing to Eastern philosophies, we note that desire is the root of all suffering, so we’re wise not to want. We declare desirelessness a highly desirable state.

Sounds good. As with all things that sound too good to be true, however, there’s an obvious catch: Pretending to not want does not desireless make.

To consider it another way, here’s a question: Is Mother Hubbard’s dog no longer hungry just because she finds the cupboard bare? Not at all. In fact, the dog with no bone will eventually begin to chew on Mother Hubbard.

Like hungry dogs, we all want. And want. And want. If we pretend we don’t, we either starve or end up unhappily chewing on wrong bones.

True wanting, wishing, and desiring are instruments of our inner guidance system. To ignore them is to deny access to our own hearts.

“Yeah, but what’s the point of admitting what I want?” asked the rock star wannabe. “What are the odds of my actually making it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But all bets are definitely off if you never declare yourself.”

Daring to say what we want gets us unstuck and sets things in motion. It’s also an act of courage because it leads to the next layer of questions: Do we want this for its own sake? Is it our heart’s true desire? Or is it a means to some other end?

Here’s where things get dangerous again. We uncover hidden motives. Things we think we shouldn’t want, maybe, or things we’d like to avoid.

Does the budding rock star genuinely want to sing her heart out on a strobe-lit stage for throbbing crowds? Or is her wish an exciting and elaborate cover plot to escape a boring life that’s too attached to overly protective parents? Either way, saying what she wants leads toward her heart’s truth.

Unless we’re willing to say what we want, we go against ourselves. We deny our heart’s desire. And if we don’t follow our heart’s desire, I think we relinquish joy.

Risky business, all right.

“I can’t get anywhere,” Ken said. “I think they made up that phrase ‘dime a dozen’ just to describe writers in New York.”

Then he told me he had a story stuck in his computer that was a spell check away from finished.

“I can’t get myself to finish it,” he said. “They’re only paying $80.”

Of course, you and I know what to tell him. We’d say, “Are you nuts? Just finish it, send it in, and use the $80 to pay the phone bill.”

But the truth is, Ken knows that, too. How come we don’t act on what we know when life gets difficult?

Maybe it has something to do with that expression we all know: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” I don’t like it. I think most of us are already too tough.

No, I prefer my cosmic Jell-O approach. It’s a way of working in tune with the universe rather than forcing something out at gunpoint. It requires a shift of perspective.

Dancing on Cosmic Jell-O

I imagine consciousness as an infinite sea of Jell-O. We’ve all got a spot on it, and when we dance in tune with our own particular rhythm right where we are, our wave reverberates through the whole cosmos. What comes back around to us, from an unexpected direction, is what we need. Of course, it may not be what we thought we wanted.

There’s a trick to cosmic Jell-O dancing. You step with positive intent and wide-eyed expectancy. You glide, opening to all possibilities. You whirl without hanging on to how you think it’s got to turn out. (For a more sophisticated version, check out Carl Jung on synchronicity, Lao-tsu on the Tao, or even Catherine Ponder on prosperity.)

I first experienced it as a kid back when Jell-O was a major food group.

When I was thirteen, I set out one Saturday to get a job. My mother thought this an overly optimistic enterprise in our little Idaho mining town where times weren’t just tough, they were desperate. But I interviewed every shopkeeper on Main Street and beyond.

They all said no.

I remember standing at the end of the street as dusk descended, reassessing what was important in my life. Proving my mother wrong clearly outweighed money. So did doing anything that might make me popular by the time I got to high school.

Decision made, I went back to the House of Flowers and told Mrs. Griffith that hers was the best business in town and that I would be working for her after school and on Saturdays. For free.

She protested. I admired her corsage technique. (She used glitter-edged net puffs amongst the roses and carnations. Any high school girl with a shoulder to pin them on wore Mrs. Griffith’s creations on dance dates.)

She hesitated. I assured her my future depended on glitter. (Somehow corsage proximity would transform me into a Popular Girl.)

She agreed. After a few weeks of free sweeping and dusting, I was on the payroll and up to my elbows in glitter. But I was never Homecoming Queen.

What I got instead was an unshakable confidence that I could make something happen in the world just by being me. By dancing right where I was.

Unfortunately, this is not something once learned, never forgotten. Over the years, I’ve left a lot of skid marks on the Jell-O.

Fear breeds amnesia. So when I get scared I forget about anything cosmic, come to a dead stop, and sink. The way out, I’ve discovered, is to tell the truth about my predicament, unhook my objecting mind, and give my whole heart to what’s in front of me.

Once when I did this, I took a temporary job that could scarcely pay the rent. The job never got any better, but I did meet my future husband.

So—what if Ken were to unhook his mind, run the spell checker, hop a train, and personally deliver his story? Maybe this isn’t about $80. Maybe it’s about a cosmic Jell-O ride into town.