If you’ve already read Happy Tango, I’m sure you will quickly spot why my brother-in-law drew my attention to these words in the fourth paragraph of Emma Brocke’s article “Eat, Pray, Cash in” in the Guardian Newspaper, Saturday 14th August 2010. She wrote,
Anything with “happiness” in the title and a set of rules to follow stands a good chance of vaulting into the bestseller lists, from business books (Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh) to Gretchen Rubin’s the Happiness Project.
If you haven’t yet read my book (sporting, as it happens, the word “Happy” in the title), then perhaps if I tell you now that it contains Sallycat’s (11) Rules for Happy Tango in Buenos Aires, you’ll get my brother-in-law’s optimistic and good-humoured drift. Anyway, despite the jolly laughter around the breakfast table as we all poured over the Guardian and its commentary on the spectacular success of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, I couldn’t help a quick click or two on the Mac to check the day’s (or I should really say the hour’s as the numbers change fast) Amazon Sales Rank Express stats on my book. After all, it’d be kind of cool to have any sort of ‘bestseller’ on my hands, wouldn’t it?
It is true that my book primarily targets a niche market (the tango dancers of the globe) and is therefore unlikely ever to be selling millions of copies and sitting up there next to Liz Gilbert on the bestseller shelves of Waterstones. But, it seems, that doesn’t mean it can’t sell relatively well and compete with the big-travel-author boys on the online, Amazon bookshelf. You can probably imagine my tickled-pink-ness when I discovered Happy Tango jockeying with the likes of Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Lonely Planet and Time Out at the top of the Amazon “Bestsellers in (the category) Argentina”… My friends, regardless of the actual number of copies sold, when you see a screen like this, with your book at #2 between Bruce and Paul, you have to finally allow yourself a little shout of delight that your dream (documented here on this blog in October 2008) to write and publish a real book which helps strangers as well as friends really, really did come true. Result? You look back. You remember the journey, and where you started. You consider where you are now. You feel absolutely bloody amazing. You dared to dream. You made your dream come true. You did it. And it’s nice to have a pic like this one to pop into my album of happy dreams lived, because when I look at it it makes my heart sing with pride and joy, and I think it probably always will.
I am a visual soul, you see. On the path of my dream to write a book, I used a mental image, of me opening a box of my own finished and published books, to help me focus on my intention. The visualisation felt like a magnet that pulled me closer to my goal. I also used concrete objects: I had business cards made with Tango dancer. Writer. Adventurer. written on them, and I took an old book, handmade a new cover for it, hand-scribed the title Sallycat’s Adventures on it, and put it on show in my apartment where I couldn’t help but see it every day… my book to be, in the making, in my mind and on my bookshelf.
I am certain that intention-imaging/modelling of this nature helped me achieve my writing-a-book dream, though the idea of it came into my life long before, via a personal development course I attended during my early twenties when I was working for IBM: the facilitator asked us to make a collage of images, images we felt drawn to as we focused on “the future I want”, chosen while flicking through magazines; I found the exercise to be powerful and I kept the collage, and over the years I made countless new ones. Over time, I did notice the ever-present open spaces and soaring birds, though I confess that my earliest efforts were also plastered with thatched country cottages, a Golf GTI 16v and some cuter-than-cute babies… The Golf materialised. The babies didn’t, and they eventually disappeared from the collages altogether, along with all types of car, while the ‘flight and freedom’ symbols multiplied. Like Amazon Sales Ranks, nothing stands still, including my dreams. And it’s up to me to stay in touch with my soul so that I know if I still want to fly (or drive) and if so, where to.
While writing this blog post, I decided to check in with myself today; in the quickest of quick exercises, I looked at the hundreds of photos that Me and C. have taken in the UK and built an instant (without allowing myself to think too much) collection of a few that pull at my heart, right here, right now. Whether symbolic or literal, it doesn’t matter; the images I choose could be signposts pointing towards my future.
What does it mean, this particular collection of snaps? Well, it’s probably a case of too few pics and too early to tell. I want to do several more of these using images from a few different sources — these are from just one set of photographs taken by Me and C. over a short summer; there’s no (obvious) tango or Buenos Aires, but then there weren’t any photos of tango or Buenos Aires in the mix of pics I was picking from. I won’t be making any grand overnight life-changing decisions based solely on this photo-collage. On the other hand, even a quick glance over it does confirm one or two things… things that I am already taking action towards. That’s cool. Reassuring stuff. And doing it makes me want to get my hands on a pile of magazines and start ripping out pages to make a huge dream-conjuring collage the size of a wall mural… ah, the creative flow once it starts flowing. Fun, isn’t it?
How do you stay in touch with your dreams and make sure you are flying in the direction of your soul’s desires? Ever tried making a collage? If not, why not give it a go? It feels like play. It’s a great way to create art out of the pile of old magazines already earmarked for recycling. And it might just set you out on a new path of the he(art). Perhaps you’ll discover that you really do want to write that bestseller. But if you do, don’t forget to magic up a title containing the word “happiness” and a few rules for the reader to follow — and who knows, if Emma Brocke is right (and I’m certainly looking forward to finding out whether she is), your dream might come true faster than you think.
Happy Tango: Sallycat’s Guide to Dancing in Buenos Aires complete with its 11 Sallycat’s Rules for Happy Tango in Buenos Aires is available from amazon.co.uk
, amazon.com
and amazon.ca
, and from BookDepository.co.uk and BookDepository.com. You can read an extract from The Introduction to the book, here; you can hook into some 5* reviews of the book, here; you can follow any updates from Buenos Aires on The (Happy Tango) Updates Blog, here; you can get notice of all updates and other Happy Tango news by ‘liking’ the book’s Facebook page, here.
Thanks go to Mark Brooker of walkjivefly.com for the super picture of Happy Tango being read on one of my favourite streets in Buenos Aires, Avenida Santa Fe; now there’s a man who is living his dreams, and I salute him for it.
