Whether it's a family in trouble or a maestro violinist playing for free, an encounter with the unexpected often provokes a recoil: What if I get sucked in? What if I do it wrong? What if I can't get back to my familiar safe shore?

In my book, The World Is a Waiting Lover, I describe allurement as the call of the Beloved, the force inside us that compels us to step into the unknown and mysterious and engage with it. In such instances, we're not choosing our direction so much as following a call. For it's not just any unknown that beckons us; the call we hear is the one that's issuing an invitation just to us.

As I noted in my book, it's no accident that Eros is the one of the few gods who have survived in the modern psyche. We can't afford to let Eros die or be watered down into a symbol of something old and fusty; we need him too much. He excites us to the new and strange and urgent, and if we ignore him in our waking life, he grabs us in dreams and forces us to confront those desires and impulses we need to grapple with. Eros connects us with our own future by opening us up to enchantment with what we must step closer to and hence pulls our steps in that direction.

The world is constantly issuing us invitations to get involved, get messy, step over the edge into the unknown, fall in love, lend a hand. We have no guarantee of success, fortune, or marriage if we say yes. But to refuse the invitation is to turn our backs on the erotic in life. 

 Image: "The Dream" by Henri Rousseau 

Recently I read an article in New York Magazine about two young actresses, Shailene Woodley (The Fault in Our Stars) and Brie Larson (Short Term 12). The women are good friends and are trying to take strong acting roles and live lives of authenticity rather than celebrity. Larson told the interviewer that she had been making a point lately of getting rejections. " 'I've been getting too much attention with ... work going so well that I try to find rejection in my day. I'll seek out someone on the street or at the farmers' market and ask for something where I know they'll say no. No one likes rejection, but it's real. And I don't want to lose that feeling.' "

"I try to find rejection in my day." You never know where you're going to find your next teacher, and when I read those words, I took note. I'd been playing it too safe lately, I thought. I needed to risk courting rejection. So I began asking for things I didn't expect to get: a ride from the airport in a distant city, an invitation to someone to be on our Radical Joy for Hard Times board whom I assumed would be too busy; a blurb from a famous writer.

And guess what: in some of these cases, the answer was yes. The point, however, was more the asking than the receiving. Each time I asked I felt emboldened.

 Image: June 2-8, 2014 issue of New York Magazine with article about Shailene Woodley & Brie Larson