I’m obsessed with compelling experience. My shtick in life is to maximize experience, for others, for myself, and to raise the experience tide for all. Often, this includes experiences online, for businesses, creators, and professionals.
But this includes all human experience and the ways our experiences of ourselves and our world are rapidly changing. I am obsessed with, enthralled by, and drawn to experience — as the basis for all that is, in addition to the practical and effective consideration for business success and creative excellence. So I write about compelling experience in all those contexts and more.
Sadly, our experiences have become defined by the virtual, digital, and artificial interactions of our device obsessions. We need instead more authentic, ‘analog’ experiences to connect with each other, the earth, and ourselves.
Genuine experience in most cases requires us to set aside or jettison entirely these nefarious panels of glass that hoard our attention and allow Big Tech to hoard our attention, privacy, money, and souls.
In the spirit of promoting authentic experiences, human connection, and intimacy, for that cause, here’s (another) example of my encounters with the authentic.
I am haunted by wind. Recent seasons have been the windiest that I can recall where I live along the Colorado Front Range.
“Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.” – Bruce Lee
This long and abrupt mountain range is a wind machine, stretching hundreds of miles from north to south on the western limit of the Great Plains. The abrupt rise of the mountains above the prairie funnels airflow from cold fronts that roar down from the north and low-pressure-driven storms that spin weather patterns up from the south.
In most places in the world, intense winds are driven by intense bad weather. That happens here, for sure. But the Front Range often creates fair-weather winds, as warm air moves from west to east and accelerates as it ‘falls’ the thousands of feet from the heights of the central Rocky Mountains to the wide-open expanse of the High Plains.
Last year, the most powerful wind storms blew directly from the west on clear and brilliant sunny days. In the old neighborhood where I live, we have giant 150-year-old spruce and fir trees, planted by the city’s founders to re-create the stately eastern cities they came from.
The winds created alarming damage and destruction for those massive old trees.
The giant conifers have no taproot and they rely on small, shallow root balls. The trees tower over those inadequate footings. The trees’ full, thick, upper growth easily catches any breeze and stands exposed to the 90+ mile-per-hour gusts that blew through here.
Many of those stately, ancient trees toppled — onto power lines, across streets and yards and parks all over the area, and onto the million-dollar mansions in our old neighborhood.
Some trees didn’t fall but snapped off like twigs halfway up their thick trunks. That’s not only a testament to the power and speed of the wind gusts, but an indication of the poor health of the trees from our years-long western drought.
Winds that strong haunt me on those clear and sunny days. They roar and shake our old house, they wake me in the night with their rush and rumble, and they keep me indoors and out from under the wildly swaying limbs and branches in this mature neighborhood forest.
As a lifelong outdoorsman and nature lover, the wind has always haunted me.
I discovered this as a youth during my first backpacking adventure in the Colorado Front Range hills. That first adventure in the early 70s, camping out with my middle school hiking club, on a night partially lit by a half moon among scattered clouds, I laid awake in my tent, listening to the mountain winds that rolled in gusts across the distant ridges and forested slopes.
They rose or faded as they approached, and then merged or divided into different directions.
That night and many forgotten nights since, I’ve been mesmerized by the rushes and roars and whispers of those winds across countless forest mountains and valleys and canyons.
It’s an ancient sound that existed long before any human could hear it and be enchanted by it, and long before any creature with ears could know of it.
When I hear the rolling and rising and falling of those breezes, especially at night in the mountains where the heights and depths and distances create relief and texture to the sounds, I’m taken back to my youth, camped among the Ponderosa Pines and the Douglas fir and the vast forests of the eastern Colorado Rockies.
I’m also taken back to a far distant earth, before any life walked or crawled or slithered among those trees, before any ears could detect the haunting winds or any heart could long for the freedom, openness, simplicity, and musical beckoning that stirs in me.
I am haunted by the soft breezes that bring the fragrances of spring, a hint of a distant thunderstorm, or a touch of relief on a steamy summer day.
I am haunted by the light rush of a breeze through my window, raising and floating the curtain invisibly.
Living most of my life on the High Plains, I’ve been haunted by the destructive, violent winds of tornadoes. I have dreams of tornadoes, often many tornadoes at once, dancing and mingling across a near horizon or cityscape.
That the world’s most destructive winds haunt my dreams makes me wonder what breezes or gales or tempests blow through my psyche. How will I be moved by the winds of whatever time remains to me, as that time fades like the mountain winds of my youth? How will those winds eventually rise and fall without me, for how many more millions of years on this planet?
What haunts you? What winds blow through your psyche that will inform and inspire a compelling reading experience for your audience? The only impact you can have on them happens within the online experience you provide. It’s all experience.
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
