Imagine it is New Year’s Eve, and you’re packing your bags and heading toward your daughter’s house to spend a couple days with her and her family.

Tonight is Zoo Lights! After Zoo Lights, I will get to watch movies with my grandkids so my daughter and her husband can go out to celebrate with a New Year’s Eve dinner. Then we all greet the new year together!

As I’m packing, I glance across a harmless over-the-counter prophylactic I have heard much about but have not used personally. Without giving too much forethought, take one.

That said, within the next five to 10 minutes I suddenly feel dizzy and nauseous. I feel like I’m on a boat, seasick. I spit that substance out of my mouth and realized, “This is not good.” “What did I do?”

I lay on my bed, thinking I would feel better in a few minutes, that this too shall pass. Within minutes, I fell asleep and woke up about 90 minutes later, realizing I would not make it to my daughter’s.

My phone conversation goes like this, “I’m not feeling great right now, I should be better soon. Go to Zoo Lights without me. I will do my best to be there before 6:00 so you and Matt can go out for dinner.”

I fall back asleep. About four hours later, I woke up, called my daughter, and said, “I am not coming. I am so sad to miss my time with you all. I will come tomorrow. I know I’ll feel better tomorrow.” The story continues to go something like this for the next two days.

Can’t believe 48 hours of this. I’m in bed the entire time except to get up to get water and food, read, and stream different podcasts and reels on my phone. I wished a few people a happy new year. My youngest visited me the first morning, and I got calls from my kids.

“What is going on?” I ask myself. This is New Year’s Eve, the first day of 2025! There’s no reason I should be spending it in bed. How could I have been so thoughtless?

This whole event is self-induced. I had only myself to blame. I’m thankful that I can take responsibility for my actions quickly. And I also know from many past experiences that they’ll be a blessing somewhere in all this. I don’t see that blessing right now. Right now, I’m just mad at myself!

Throughout the 36 hours, things shifted to where I started, just trying to make the best of it. Oh my goodness, I have all this downtime. Maybe I’ll listen to a few podcasts and get caught up on XYZ.

In one of my random breaks of feeling only ok, I came across the most random video about Manifestation. I loved it and knew this would help me with my goals for 2025 and beyond.

Over the next 24 hours, there were many periods I could get clarity, fully identify precisely what I wanted, and bring clarity to them. I went back and started handwriting notes about Manifestation.

Later that evening, I thought of using the voice dictation feature in Microsoft Word and transcribed the entire 15-minute video. At 2:00 am. on January 2nd, in a moment, I thought I was totally over this. I sat up in bed, and for the next 1 ½ hours, I edited the document.

What was so powerful was that the 10 steps of Manifestation were 10 steps of exactly what Master Key Experience (MKE) teaches. Step 1 starts with getting away in solitude (Sits), identifying what we truly want in writing, and describing it in detail. (DMP).

In the next 9 steps, the article describes the MKE process of changing our Subby and using imagination and visualization to manifest what you want out of life. The article uses different verbiage, but the meaning is the same.

After feeling better, I realized that even if I wasn’t able to see the Zoo Lights with my family on New Year’s Eve, there were still Nuggets of Gold that I could mine out of the situation.

My INTENTION (my new word for 2025) is to practice 5 gold nuggets (to be determined) and implement them into how I process my goals this year! Excited for 2025! Happy New Year MKE Family!