In the last year plus, I’ve found my voice and the intrinsic motivation to write, and constantly. I’ve been a writer, off and on, here and there, now and then, through most of my life.
But the drive always wavered, my heart wasn’t always in it.
That, most beautifully, is no longer a problem. I fill journals regularly.
The next stirring that I wrestle with is publishing. All those journals contain articles, essays, how-to, business lessons, memoir, and much else worthy of public view.
But for me, what is the impetus to publish? What drivers do I experience, that may or may not be the same or similar to other authors and creators?
I hesitate to call this ‘publishing’ —
That’s an antiquated term, suggesting publishers and an industry bureaucracy to navigate. My writing feeds articles, podcasts, courses, reports, speaking, coaching, and I do all that myself, without any bureaucracy.
The more universal callings so familiar to the writing community are the desire to be heard, for our voices to go out in the world, that we may be seen, that we may exist in the community of man and add to and minutely revise the Global Mind.
Beyond our own selfish needs and longing, many writers are also driven by the need to be useful. Self is so small, so fickle, so often petty and pouty — if we can rise above that and contribute, then we can be convinced we are made of more than the smallish dramas we play out.
Beyond those purposes and others common to many writers and creators, I experience my own. Though I cannot name the stirring or define or come close to understanding these desires, they are as real and powerful as the forces that move my pen every day.
Some mystics would claim we are caught in and may be entirely animated by a mystical revolutionary force, a creative advancement, a constant push toward novelty and progressive mutation. Otherwise, how can we explain the state of the known universe, the state of life on earth, the flow of consciousness, intelligence, and morals in human form?
For me, all these drivers and others become grounded in a personal revolution — to rise above the smallness of my family of origin and their legacy.
From the momentum of that legacy, I am pulled in one direction, and from a higher stirring, in another direction. So, I’m tugged in two sizes and scales.
My legacy from my parents and their lineage is to get small, and smaller and smaller. From otherwise I’m called, as Rumi said, to “Stop acting so small, as I am universe in ecstatic motion.”
My dear mother was battered and bruised by life, by my violent alcoholic father, by the death of her third son at age 3, by the overwhelming responsibility of moving her other four children across the country when leaving my father in the middle of the night in 1970, taking with us only a few suitcases, and starting over entirely.
From there, she worked 2 to 3 jobs and rebuilt our lives, with only her own wits and grit.
Then later in life, she became a recluse, for the last 10 years she was alive, because she had nothing left for the world or for her family.
I accept that and I will love her for her courage and her wits and her grit forever.
My father the alcoholic lost himself, became small, or started small and never grew any larger, in his addiction to nicotine, booze, and work. He probably considered his work ethic a commendable trait, because despite his drunkenness he never missed a day of work in his life. He worked as a laborer for DuPont from his teens until he retired.
Today I struggle with the same demons they did — both of them. Through my DNA or my training in their household as a child, I learned to become overwhelmed by life, to either take on too much and become hyper-responsible, or to allow what I did take on to smother me, to stress and pressure me to the point of having serious health problems, or more likely, both of those.
And like my father, I allowed my addictions and distractions to steal my time, energy, self-respect, and courage. Those choices contributed to the stress and overwhelm because they sapped my vitality, my resilience, and my focus.
These are what made me small and dragged me into a narrower, isolated, careful lifestyle. Given my family history, they were perfectly expected and consistent.
I know how my mom felt. I know intimately the desire to get quiet, be alone, close out the madness and stress in the world, and find ease and comfort instead.
I know what my father’s mindless distraction and diversion and obsessive compulsive behavior feels like and how that too is a defense against and a drug to ease the pain and fear and shame of being in an active, demanding, judging world.
Yet despite that legacy and those models, still am I called to be in that world, to write, speak, connect, teach, participate, and publish in the giant sandbox-classroom that is the human condition, the planetary community, the Global Mind.
Through callings I cannot define, from sources I cannot identify, I am drawn to be bigger, despite the DNA and lingering (and inevitable resign-myself-to-its-existence) trauma that calls me to hide under the bushel basket of my fear, shame, and stress.
The question I am living now is how to express, to live that call to be larger, to extend my reach, my voice, and my ideas to a national and global audience by publishing and speaking.
No one in my lineage, currently or in the past, has ever made such an effort, ever had an inclination that becoming an influencer and a leader was possible or necessary.
In my home as a child, the culture of our family would hold anyone with such aspirations and ambitions as some kind of big shot, as someone who would look down upon us, when the only looking down was the shame and smallness we reflected on ourselves and were afraid to look at, afraid to acknowledge, because we had no tools, no cause, no inclination that such self-awareness existed.
“Oh, I see, you must be some kind of big shot.”
For those of us that were planted and harvested in shame and smallness, from whence does our desire and ability to grow beyond that arise?
Spontaneously, apparently — from that inexorable creative advancement into novelty, which is so deep, so mysterious that I cannot name or describe it.
I will only give thanks and show up and engage.
I am learning, probably not for the first time, to not question or attempt to understand these phenomena.
All outcomes in business happen only through the experiences we create.
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I’m Bob Berry — researcher, speaker, writer, and innovator on the art of compelling experience.bob@itstheusers.com / LinkedIn / http://ItsTheUsers.com
