I know that in calendar terms, I’ve only just arrived at our literal and figurative summit (more than 9,000 feet above sea level, in Keystone, Colorado). My lungs keep reminding me, “This fluff you’re breathing is pathetic! Where did all the oxygen go?” But my mind and soul feel as if they’ve been here for weeks. So much has happened.

And so much hasn’t.

To me, the strangest thing about this convention is the lack of drama and unpleasantness you’d usually find in any group of professionals, especially a group this size. Most of us have experienced minor altitude sickness, little travel complications, and scheduling snafus. There’s been every opportunity for competitive, conniving careerism. Yet the spirit in our group has grown steadily sweeter, calmer, more enthusiastic, and more friendly.

This is extraordinary.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a life coach, it’s that people have characteristic “failure modes” that send them into tantrums and tailspins, especially in unfamiliar circumstances. In a large group, you get a lot of freak-outs. Not here.

Instead, I’ve watched people processing their inter-cranial bullcrap before it even exists. Events that would lead to hurt feelings, sulking, or arguments in most groups appear only as thoughtful looks, immediately followed by either peace or productive conversation. Everyone is finding ways to make this the best possible experience for themselves, and in so doing, they make it a wonderful experience for those around them. By what mysterious act of grace did such creatures come into my life?

There is such beauty in this spectacular place. There is such beauty in these spectacular human beings. As we trade hugs and hints and enthusiasm, there have been many moments when it feels to me as if all of us–and everything around us–are one being. This isn’t the unanimity that comes from eliminating our differences, but from the radically unconditional acceptance of those differences. Even as strangers, we know one another, and as Mark Nepo writes:

To know someone deeply
Is like hearing the moon through the ocean
Or having a hawk lay bright leaves at your feet.
It seems impossible, even while it happens.

This is the most fabulous life I’ve ever had, but oh, my, is it busy! Sometimes I feel like Lucy Ricardo in the chocolate factory, juggling projects with both hands, carrying several in my teeth, dropping dozens. I suspect you know how this feels. In the age of speedspeedspeedspeedspeed, we’re all struggling to keep our balance.

But at least, I believe, we have some help.

Y’all know I left the company of dignified rationalists long ago, that I see life as a mystical adventure. The photo shoot reminded me of this, because recently, small miracles have been happening for me with photographs. Here’s one of them, which I’m telling just because it lifted my spirit.

During my April trip to Africa I decided to mentally “called” a cheetah, since I haven’t seen one for years. For a week, we saw no hint of cheetah activity; as Mark Twain put it, “no hair nor no next of skin.” Oh, well, I thought. The universe isn’t hostile. It’s just not all that forthcoming. Kind of like the post office.

At the very end of our final game drive, I finally gave up looking for cheetahs (the phrase “I gave up” is key: we manifest only what we surrender). We drove up a hill to take in one last view. As we gazed over the savannah, our tracker saw a tiny square of white about a mile away. It was the chest of a cheetah who’d climbed a termite mound! We tore over there and found the cheetah tucked in the shadows, looking reluctant, like a post-office employee.

I decided this did not qualify as a miracle, even a small one. I went to cheetah territory, asked experts to help me track cheetah, and they found a cheetah. A wonderful human accomplishment, but nothing magical about it.

Just then, another Land Rover zoomed up in a spray of gravel. It carried a single guest: my friend (and Teammate) Kelly Eide. Minutes before, she’d been sound asleep. Then a loud, persistent gang of monkeys began pounding on the roof of her room. She woke up thinking, “Oh my gosh, there’s a cheetah out there that I have to photograph!” She leaped out of bed, grabbed a camera, and ran through the lodge yelling, “Where’s a ranger? I have to photograph a cheetah!” The ranger she found thought she’d lost her mind, but he and Kelly got to our cheetah sighting just in time for her to snap some great shots. Now those pictures (including the one at the top of this post) are here to remind me: We really do have help.

Yesterday I looked at my fancy-schmancy online calendar and realized it contained less free time than a maximum-security prisoner gets to wander around the yard stabbing people. I also noticed my growing inclination to stab people myself. TIME TO DECLUTTER!

It’s no coincidence that my computer screen is a blizzard of open documents, and that my bathroom drawers are collapsing under the weight of soaps and supplements. The way we do anything is the way we do everything. So to put my mind in cleanup mode, I’m turning to my friend Peter Walsh, declutterer extraordinaire, for inspiration.

I last saw Peter at Oprah Magazine’s 10th anniversary celebration. He is a true Australian gentleman-kind, authentic, hilarious, and willing to give you the straight-on truth. The day I filmed this clip, I’d prepped myself for multiple speeches and photo shoot by putting in my contact lenses—using a new lens solution that happens to be highly toxic to eyeballs.

WHY WOULD ANYONE MAKE SUCH STUFF?

Anyway, by the time I stopped screaming and rinsed my left eyeball, it was a bright-red horror right out of the TWILIGHT series, but without the glamour. I slathered the poor thing with eyedrops and went to the big event feeling self-conscious and distraught. I whined so much about my Vlad the Impaler Eye that Peter eventually forbade me to speak of it. His direct, funny, tough approach got me through that day.

So here are 3 tips Peter gives for cleaning your home (check out his site http://www.peterwalshdesign.com/index.php). I’ve modified Peter’s ideas about your home so that they apply to your schedule:

• Designate some time for decluttering. I’ll have to cancel something just to dedicate 30 minutes for figuring out what else I can cancel or delegate, but it’s worth it.

• Declutter one small, limited area at a time. In your home, this might mean a single drawer. I’m translating it to scheduling by limiting the time I spend writing this blog to 20 minutes (my tendency is to get perfectionistic and verbose, which takes forever).

• As you consider each object in your home—or in my case, appointment and activities listed in your calendar, ask these questions:

Do I love this activity?

Is an unloved appointment taking up time I could use to do
something more valuable or useful to me?

Is there any other way I could accomplish what I want?

In a year, will it matter whether or not I’ve done this thing?

Right now, I’m keeping all these questions in mind. I’m doing something I love (writing to y’all), but I’m also minimizing the time I spend doing it. Another way to accomplish what I want—and sort of have someone else do this—is to throw in the video above.

I hope you, too, encounter someone as brilliant and compassionate as Peter when things aren’t going well, and that these hints can help you have slightly less cluttered, slightly more manageable, wonderfully imperfect day.

Just when you think you’re the only person who feels the way you do, you see someone you just know is having to cope with all the same life stresses. I have no idea who this woman is, but I take great comfort in her very existence: A fellow Airport Hobo. Makes me well right up.

By and large, things aren’t nearly as bad as we think they are. Our futures aren’t as chancy, our financial survival not as precarious, our detractors not as ferocious as we fear. But sometimes, when we get really stumped, we have good reason.

This has happened to me with vlogs. About a month ago I made a bunch of ‘em, thinking I’d upload them while I was in Africa. I spent many hours—MANY hours—trying. It didn’t work well. I confess that there were moments I believed the entire electrical supply grid of Africa is run by an elderly woman peddling a bicycle treadmill.

Then I got home, talked to my fabulous media coach, and discovered that I was having trouble uploading because of a glitch in the code that links my whobertube thingamajig to alwaysonwhatchamacallit, or words to that effect.

The following video, which I taped in Africa, shows my friend Bronwyn and her brother Boyd talking about a woman who had a Justifiable Problem. I hope you enjoy it, and remember that it’s okay to ask for help when you’re stumped, because sometimes you really can’t be expected to handle everything alone.

Last week I attended a marvelous birthday bash for my South African friend Sal Roux. Sal threw her party at a game preserve called Phinda, in a “sand forest” where the trees stand like cathedral pillars under an eerie green canopy, and you never know how many animal eyes are watching as you pad your way through the soft soil.

When I unpacked at Phinda, I had a sickening realization: I’d left my formal shoes in Johannesburg. Sal doesn’t do anything by halves, so I knew her birthday banquet would be a black-tie affair. I’d brought a couple of halfway-acceptable outfits, but now I had no shoes to go with them. My usual bush footwear—brown cowboy boots—just wouldn’t do. Luckily, I had a backup pair of flat black slippers, although, because they were slightly too big, I had to bulk out my feet with a pair of brown socks. That way they at least stayed on my feet, though I had to curl my toes and sort of waddle to avoid stepping right out of them.

“It’s really dark,” I kept reassuring my ego. “It’s the middle of the African bush. No one will be looking down.”

My ego was not convinced. It kept glancing down and seeing this:

As I neared the game lodge where the party was getting started, the darkness was split by a deafening drumbeat. The forest went from silent to deafening as a group of Zulu dancers, in full traditional dress, began dancing and singing around the arriving guests. The dancers’ animal-hide headdresses and loincloths flashed in the torchlight. Once my heart started beating again, I thought they were wonderful.

Then I got to the lodge and saw all the other female party-goers bent over, brushing sand off their feet before strapping on high heeled sandals and pumps. Such shoes are about as functional in a sand forest as a paper snorkel, so everyone seemed to be apologizing for various malfunctions affecting their Jimmy Choos.

Remember, I was wearing socks.

Thick, brown socks.

In desperation, I found a seat near the Zulu dancers and tried to tuck my feet into a shadow. The dancers were truly amazing. Each of them burned more calories that evening than I did during the entire 1990s. But as I watched them more closely, I noticed something: A lot of them were subtly adjusting their headdresses and leggings. They took turns dancing solos, and some of them seemed a little klutzier than others, and these people clearly knew it. The klutzes would return to their place among the other dancers looking as if they’d welcome a leopard attack, as long as it distracted attention from their missteps.

In that moment, with my gaze swinging between the self-conscious Zulu dancers and the self-conscious high-heel wearers, I had an epiphany: All humans are united, no matter how great our differences, by our fear of looking dorky.

In an instant, this changed my view of other times and cultures. I could see other African dancers getting dressed before history began, asking their friends, “Do you really think the kudu skin goes with the porcupine quills? Isn’t it kind of too much?” I pictured ancient Americans saying, “Uh, Bison Flower, hasn’t anyone told you not to wear elk teeth after the green corn moon?” I can imagine a moment when the 12th-century Japanese Shogun realized his armor no longer fit around the middle, and that in that moment he strongly considered ritual suicide.

This revelation was deeply comforting. I felt new kinship with people from all times and places who ended up in their culture’s equivalent of brown socks at a sparkling black-tie event. I took a deep breath, watched a Zulu dancer furtively adjusting his impala-skin loincloth, and waddled out to join the rest of humanity in our common sea of appalling insecurity.

So this morning I got a personal tour through the most incredible find in paleoanthropological discovery of my lifetime, quite possibly ever. Dr. Lee Berger himself walked me and two friends through the museum display of a hominid skeleton that might belong to one of my own direct relatives. The visit left my mind reeling, as it often does, between the logical smoothness of hard science, which I find very soothing, and the insane improbability of Berger’s find, which once again makes me suspect there are forces at work to which most of science, so far, remains blind.

Let me explain.

One day, a family group of human-like creatures with heads a lot like ours, legs a lot like ours, social behaviors a lot like ours, and arms a lot like an orangutan’s, were hanging out together in southern Africa when something went dramatically wrong. It looks as though they fell into a “death trap,” perhaps when an underground cave collapsed under their feet. They all died within hours of each other, along with a saber-toothed cat, a horse, wild dog, hyena and other animals. It is believed they were playing dodge ball at the time.

I made that last sentence up. So far, scientists have not been able to determine whether they were playing dodge ball or doing the Macarena. But this next part is true:

Right after the group died, an upwelling of unusual water—water so ancient it contained no oxygen and therefore no bacteria or insect life—swept all the bodies into a pocket of the cave. Within hours, a blend of this sterile water and limestone filled the cave and set like cement. This created near-perfect natural preservation, which has only recently been simulated by modern-day plastic surgeons working in Beverly Hills.

During the next 1.9 million years, the Skeleton Family was pushed surface-ward as the earth above them slowly eroded. A few decades ago, a tiny bit of one skeleton finally broke the surface. In another few years, it would have been destroyed by natural forces as it lay exposed to weather, animals, and so on. But, in the incredibly tiny window when the bone was lying on the surface, but still undisturbed, a 9-year-old boy named Matt Berger noticed it while walking with his father.

“From 5 meters away,” Lee Berger told me, about 18 months after that fateful walk, “I knew it was a clavicle.”

Well, of course he did.

You see, Dr. Berger had written a Ph.D. dissertation on hominid clavicles. He has possibly thought more about clavicles than anyone else on earth who was not eating seriously party-oriented mushrooms.

The clavicle turned out to belong to a Skeleton Family boy who was about Matt’s age when he died. His bones, and the bones of his relatives, are still being unearthed. To give you some perspective: The skeleton fragments that make up our biological record of hominid evolution comprise a bit of skull here, a tooth there, a knuckle somewhere else. No skeletons this complete have been found before. No two individual ancient hominids have ever been found together. No examples of both sexes of the same hominid have been found together. No directly related individuals have ever been found…I could go on and on, but suffice it to say this find is mind-bogglingly rich. Organic things just don’t last 2 million years, except in the bizarre circumstances that preserved the Skeleton Family.

In this case, scientists are examining the tartar on the Skeleton Family’s teeth to see what they ate for their last meal. Seriously. I saw the teeth this morning with my own beady eyes, and they look just like mine feel after eating a lollipop. When they finish digging up the kid’s mother, who died next to him, they’ll probably figure out that she was just about to make him go brush properly when the cave-in occurred.

There’s a famous example of probability you’ll hear in basic statistics classes: If you let a chimpanzee bang on a keyboard at random forever, he’ll eventually—by pure chance—type up the complete works of Shakespeare. Obviously, this will take a long time, longer even than your average cocktail party, which, from my perspective, is virtually infinite. But the chimp’s odds of duplicating Shakespeare don’t seem all that different from the odds of a clavicle specialist’s young son happening upon another young boy’s clavicle during the brief period when the bone went visible after being fossilized in a freak, high-preservation accident almost 2 million years ago.

“Can I ask you a goony-fan question?” I asked Dr. Berger as we stood ogling the skeleton, complete with its tooth-tartar. “When you realized what you’d found, how did it feel?”

“I haven’t slept for eighteen months,” he said.

I may not sleep that well myself tonight. I’m shocked awake all over again every time some incredible reality nudges me toward dropping my Newtonian model of the world, where things happen randomly, and the emerging post-Newtonian worldview in which time is not linear, matter is only a form of energy, and things are connected in ways we’ve only begun to fathom.

I mean really—five years of studying clavicles? Who does that?

So if you’re reading this at a time when the odds against you feel large and your chance of success tiny, pay attention. Go for a lot of walks. Notice what you feel compelled to learn. Follow your hunches. Hold in your mind’s hands, see with your mind’s eyes, hear with your mind’s ears, the unbelievable good fortune you hope will happen to you.

Then work your hind end off, travel to wherever the odds are good, and never stop searching. Oh, and always travel with a child, or at least a child’s-eye view. You never know where a 9-year-old is going to find a friend.

Because I flit around the globe fairly frequently, people tend to assume I’m one of those good-to-go, Eat-Pray-Love-To-Travel kind of girls. I am not. My favorite fantasy is that I can just beam myself places á la Star Trek, nestling into my own bed every single night and a large portion of every day.

But once I’m traveling, I try to bloom where I’m planted, despite jetlag and disorientation. By and large, I do all right. This is especially true in the African bush, where I feel deeply relaxed despite days that begin as early as 3:00 a.m. and continue as late as midnight.

This scheduling isn’t masochism, just a fascination with animals both diurnal and nocturnal. The last evening I was at Londolozi, my friends and I were prepping dinner when we heard that two male leopards were squaring off for a fight nearby. Everyone sprinted to an open Land Rover, leaving the food on the table. We spent the next hour gazing at the incredibly brilliant stars and drinking mini-bar liqueurs while the leopards thrashed around us in the tall grass, growling at each other.

Sleep? Who needs it?

As it turns out, I do.

During my two weeks in Africa I have slept, by my own calculation, for approximately seventeen minutes. That said, it must be noted that “my own calculation” is none too trustworthy. I can tell you this for certain, because I cannot find my pants.

They’re my favorite pants—you know, that one perfect pair of black pants that fits well, doesn’t need ironing, and can go from casual to formal with a few accessories? Such pants are like soulmate; you don’t find them more than once or twice in a lifetime. I wore my special pants all day yesterday while training some wonderful coaches and having dinner with friends. After that I was so tired I don’t remember getting back to my hotel. When I woke up, my shoes, blouse, and jacket were on the floor by my bed. But my pants are gone. I’ve pawed through my luggage a dozen times, searched every inch of my hotel room.

No pants.

You know, it’s impossible to predict what’s going to break the camel’s back.

This month I’ve heard tales of anti-Apartheid heroism, I toured a hospital where a patient casually toted a jug that was stuck through his chest wall so his punctured lung wouldn’t collapse, and spent an hour teaching a 15-year-old orphan who’s holding her family together with nothing but hope and grit. I heard by “bush telegram” (word-of-mouth) that Iceland went postal on Europe. I’ve handled this all with deep breaths, optimism, and a smile.

But my favorite pants going AWOL—well, that’s just too much.

Worse than the wrenching loss and the terrible fear of never ever ever finding such a great pair of pants again, is my utter bewilderment. What the hell happened to them? My addled brain keeps going through the possibilities:

• In my sleep-deprived madness, I could have had some sort of wild fling in the hotel elevator. If so, it seems deeply unfair that I can’t remember it.

• Perhaps as I was undressing, I hallucinated a dragon coming in through the open window, and defended myself—as one does—by hurling my pants at it.

• Extremely tired people do weird things in their sleep (I have an insomniacal friend who awoke one morning to find approximately 500 “Thank you for your order!” emails from Amazon.com). For all I know, I gave my pants to the maid as a tip.

• Perhaps my subconscious self hates globe-trotting, and stuffed my favorite travel pants into the hotel ventilation system reasoning that without them, I’ll just stay home.

• Maybe I ate them.

At any rate, they’re gone, and this on top of the anti-Apartheid stories and the punctured-lung jug and the orphans and Iceland LITERALLY invading Europe…well, it just makes me want to lie down and suck my thumb forever.

I’m so grateful for my happy, itinerant life. I know you’re grateful for the good in your life as well. But sometimes we wake up and our pants are inexplicably gone, and at those times, it’s okay to be weak. It’s okay to slump to the floor in a hotel robe, pound the carpet, and, yes, use strong language. It’s okay to feel that of all the massive natural and man-made disasters in the world, the bizarre disappearance of our own personal favorite pants is for us, at that moment, by far the worst.

All right, enough whining. It’s time to pull myself together, regain perspective, and prepare for another really lovely event, which I will experience through the light haze of a waking REM doze. It’s time to be thankful that I have other pants—inferior ones, but pants—to wear in place of my bygone favorites.

And I am thankful. I truly am. Just please, God, let my underwear be where I left it.