I wonder what I'm missing out on when I'm not online

Her hair was frizzy and unkempt, and her house slippers were ratty. Streak your beard with gold. Paint fingernails black with glitter. Wear glow-in-the-dark sunglasses from the dollar store, or ask your kid for a temporary tattoo--maybe he sticks a unicorn on your inner wrist and you cherish it all day. Masquerading triggers the interloper in all of us, that desire to hop the fence and swim in the neighbor's pool, to sneak backstage without a pass, to joyride around moonlit suburbs in our parents' car while they sleep. A friend found a vacation-rental fire sale for a castle in Scotland, and Jardine went in on it with twelve friends, and everyone wore tartan tights and black velvet jackets and sat around and ate wild trout and drank tea and felt a wee bit amused by life, and a wee bit invigorated by invading a different reality. Amanda wouldn't even consider a Texas article Festival Gala without a package of dresses from Rent the Runway. Once, her $3,000 Oscar de la Renta gown (Amanda's for three days! Then she got home, and the ball gown that had been amazing and impossibly possible and fairy-tale was suddenly a bummer. She kicked the heels across her bedroom and savored the moment of peeling off the dress, zippers and straps and ribs and pleats and all, since it was squeezing the very life out of her. Toasting can be a hard moment for a sober person. Declan Coffey is part of the senior leadership team of the technology company DXC Technology, despite the fact that he had never planned to work in IT. Before taking up his leadership role with the technology giant, he was part of British retail department store John Lewis, but relinquished this role to pursue a life in art. In fact, his introduction to the world of technology was quite accidental. He literally bumped into an IT leader at a pub, got offered a job over a beer, and went on to have a stellar IT career. I was asking the guy from the IT company I'd just met about his business and trying to connect his challenges to things I had learned in retail. I was telling him my ideas and he said, `Come and work for me. But it all worked out. Coffey was able to transfer skills from one industry to another because he possessed the skills to identify what was industry transferrable. Critical in the exercise of transference are the tools and techniques of `mixing and macro-ing' -- the ability to cross-pollinate and recognise universals.

As well as having worked in the advertising, publishing and luxury industries for many years, NET-A-PORTER co-founder Megan Quinn started a cleaning business. True empaths, and I have worked with many over the years, take on other people's emotions, thoughts, and even physical symptoms. What happens when you're an empath is that your energy centers are too open and your personal boundaries are weak, perhaps nonexistent, therefore allowing other people's energy to come in. When these two energies mix, it disrupts your own nervous system and makes it difficult to distinguish your feelings from the other person's. In this state of confusion, it's challenging to make decisions with your own best interest at heart. Oftentimes we absorb other people's energy without realizing it because it's a habit we've had for so long and it works in many subtle ways. The good news is that by taking the time to practice the Boundaries Breath, you will begin to establish strength in your own system so that you have the power to stay in your own lane, differentiate from others, feel less responsible for others, and feel empowered to make saying no part of your life. Many of the clients I've worked with haven't had luck with the more cognitive psychotherapy interventions around setting boundaries because they didn't address the body. If you feel like you don't have any boundaries and can't sense your body, it's incredibly difficult to try to communicate your needs. What's powerful about the Boundaries Breath is that it works directly with your body through the breath while giving you a visual tool to further support the practice. This combination of breath, visualizing, and eventually vocalizing are key aspects to why the practice is effective. To the north, the glacial till stretches as far as Lake Erie; The area lies south of the Firelands--about five hundred thousand acres now in Erie, Huron, and Ashland Counties--and is contained in the Western Reserve (part of the Northwest Territories), sold by the state of Connecticut to the US government in the Ordinance of 1787. In a sense I have returned to a place that I once knew fairly well. We live on a county road of working family farms, although only two of them operate with no second income: a wife and husband run a dairy operation with seasonal help about two miles south of our place; He died a few years ago at ninety-two. Although he once told me that if he had a second chance at his life he would not choose farming, I cannot believe he was sincere, since even in his late eighties he leaped with the agility of a young man onto his tractor and with one hand threw hay bales weighing forty pounds high into the mow. His animals and fields were immaculately cared for, and the hay I bought from him was always of very good quality. We cannot call our place a homestead because we did not build the house. Even though we do not cultivate the land and produce crops, I refer to it as a farm because we own the house, barn, and two outbuildings of the original farmstead;

I must even record the tonnage of my truck and the horsepower of my tractor. It was one o'clock in the afternoon, and it looked like she had just woken up. You must be Chris. Come in, she said, opening the door just enough to let me through. I followed her through the house, wondering why it was so dark, and without thinking, I said, Is your power out? When she said, I'm bulimic and an agoraphobic too, I almost bolted, remembering that I hadn't told anyone where I was going, but calmed down when we entered the gorgeous kitchen. We sat down and I rudely blurted, I thought you told me that these products were incredible and that you had lost weight. If she had lied to me about how great this whole thing was and how much money she made and if it didn't really work, it would break me. If she took away the little bit of hope I did have that this product would help me. I lost over seventy pounds and my allergies cleared up, my bulimia is cleared up, and I'm losing more each week. Didn't you tell me you had been in this company for five years? It can put some of us in jeopardy. For example, we're at a wedding, and we let the server leave the flute of champagne in front of us--just for the ritual (we tell ourselves), we have no intention of drinking it--we plan to raise the glass with everyone else to the couple, but we won't have any. Then, cold glass in our hand, we do raise it, the world sips--suddenly muscle-memory takes over, and we're drinking. Amanda has a sober friend whose dying father begged her to raise a drink with him. Before she knew what was happening, she was holding a cold beer. She decided not to sip but felt guilty even though she'd worked so hard for her 202 days of sobriety. For people who are cool with booze, who never think about sobriety and don't need to, it's sometimes incomprehensible how one step can destroy a massive commitment, can topple an endeavor. But for many of us who have wrestled with the cunning and baffling force of alcohol, we know exactly what one sip can mean. Toasting gives our sly minds a good avenue to get back to the old life.

The social pressure to join this ritual feels like the law of the universe in that minute, and we must obey. Having been brought up in business though, I always had a very strong appreciation of the importance of customer service, loyal, energised staff, exceeding expectations, constant improvement and even humour in any business including cleaning. We went to enormous lengths to make our customers feel uniquely special. Quinn knew their pure play start-up couldn't replicate in-store luxury retail experiences like handsome doormen, champagne in the changing room, and extraordinary interiors and service experiences, We were asking people not to go into these beautiful stores and get sucky up service and stuff, how are going to get that through a computer? So she went about reverse engineering what the customer couldn't get in-store, and layered that with exemplary customer service and designed the now iconic packaging. Quinn is a master of macro-ing and mixing. Former Viacom co-president and MTV founder Tom Freston made a similar observation: `Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way. So how might we exercise our mixing and macro-ing muscles? Steve Jobs had a casual interest in calligraphy, which he indulged while hanging around Reed College campus as a college drop out. This contributed enormously to the variety of fonts we now enjoy in word processing and presentation software. Breathe in and out through the nose for a minute to settle in. Begin by visualizing a sphere of gold surrounding you on the inhale. As you exhale, keep that sphere in place, allowing it to settle. Notice where the edge of the sphere is in relation to your body. Is it three inches away, one foot, ten? Make a quick mental note and then come back to your breath. Keep the sphere in the same place for the next seven minutes as you continue to inhale and exhale. Take a full minute to release the visual guide of the sphere and settle into yourself. As you settle, see if any words want to be expressed around your boundary.

Be sure to jot down in your notes where the sphere was in relation to your body in your practice session. In spite of this chore (which I perform with alacrity because doing so makes me feel important), I do not presume to call myself a farmer, which is defined as someone who produces more than the family consumes (and incidentally works harder than I ever will). Those whose families consume most of what they produce may be called gardeners, but that word connotes a grower of plants for sale or designer of landscapes. I am not even a hobby farmer, as I no longer raise foals for sale or sell produce in the farm markets, as I did years ago. The sense of place here is underwritten by history. In 1812 the Shawnee village of Greentown, five miles west of my house and one mile north of present-day Perrysville, was destroyed by settlers in retaliation for the murder of two farmers. The village (and the present-day township) was named for the Tory Thomas Green who migrated west after the Revolutionary War and lived with the Shawnee. The pioneer horticulturalist and Swedenborgian philosopher John Chapman, known as Appleseed John, lived and planted trees near here. Our little spread is rectangular, with longer road frontage than depth. The house faces west and sits high on a rise with four large trees in front--Norway spruces about eighty feet high, a cedar, and a pin oak. Two old box elders had to be cut down as they were dropping large limbs close to the house. I asked warily. Yes, but this new Thermogenics product just came out two months ago and people are losing weight like crazy. I didn't want to leave without my pills, so I handed her my $36 and she gave me back $4 since she didn't have to ship it to me. You know, we have a lot more products, weight-loss tea, protein shakes. Just the pills, please, I said firmly. I'll put in a few samples of the NRG tea and the shake mix. I watched her put a bunch of literature and the samples in a bag. As she did this, she handed me what looked like a check. I read, $5,000, and asked, What's this?