Once upon a time I owned my name domain: emihart.com. I'm branded as @emihart on every social media channel so it only made sense that I'd have a website with the same name. It was a glorious little lo-tech site that I had built on my Mac which served the purpose of showcasing some music and videos that I'd created. Then like a fool I forgot to renew the domain name and lost emihart.com. Now when you visit my domain name, you'll find a site written in Japanese with cats on the header. I just about cried when I realized that someone had snatched up the domain, mostly because I knew that my carelessness had led to the situation before me. For one solid week all I did was obsess incessantly about what had happened. I showed it to everyone I knew. I showed it to my pharmacist, the cashier at the grocery store and random people in the elevator. No one really cared, why should they? But they all at least got a good laugh out of it.
I was now left with the decision of what to do next. I am working on building a music and speaking career, I needed to build a website. Here are a few options I considered:
-Change my name to "Emmy Heart? Emi Heart? Aimee Smart?"
-Sue the bastards squatting on my domain name.
-Fly to Hong Kong, hire a band of miscreants and beat down the cat lover who stole my domain with a dog shaped cleaver.
-Forget about the internet altogether and move to sending handwritten parchment scrolls via messenger pigeon.
None of these options seemed like the correct course of action. I even paid for godaddy.com to reach out to the domain owner to negotiate a buy back, but there was no response from the domain owner. The cats were playing hard ball with a Japanese wall of silence. I had to accept that the domain was gone. I'm someone who firmly believes that the universe sends us lessons and the only thing we can control is how we react to these perceived struggles. Let go of who you are, stop trying to control every situation, sit back and laugh at the cats. These are the lessons I learned in one fell swoop. As Jack Handy once said: "If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because man, they're gone."
By accepting the situation for what it was, I finally opened my mind up to other possibilities and searched for other available domain names. I ended up purchasing the domain "myhappinessguide.com" and went forward with building a brand new site. Other than always auto-renew your domain names, the lesson I learned from this loss is that going with the flow is the best way to find your higher purpose. I wouldn't have switched gears and thought more deeply about what it is that I want to create had it not been for those damn cats. I'm meant to be a teacher to the world and one day I'll show millions of people how to live happier lives. I'm not quite sure how exactly I'll do that, but at the very least, I promise to amuse you as I figure it out.
Oh, and if you should ever happen to retrieve my domain name please give it back to me. I will hug you more earnestly than you've ever been bear hugged in your entire life.