by Timberry on March 20, 2009
Chris Brogan writes Want to Know the Real Reason Why You Write on his copyblogger blog. He’s one of the best, and one of the best known, bloggers. He has hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
I got to thinking about it when a commenter on a previous post said that most people would love to write because there’s some kind of natural pull towards writing. I was also intrigued when I saw that established and well known bloggers Holly Hoffman and Jamie Harrop both started up brand new blogs last week, with subjects close to their hearts.
“Why?” He asks. Because what they were doing, the blogs they’d built, helped them discover their real voices. But they weren’t their real voices.
That’s a lot of what this blog is about. Chris continues…
Think about it for a moment. What are you speaking with before you find your voice? What are you saying and what message are you delivering? And just who are you being before you find your voice?
Before that happens your writing will be more constructed, abstracted, intellectualized. It’ll probably feel more of a struggle to get the words onto the page for the simple reason that you’re missing something fundamental.
You.
Both Holly and Jamie mentioned this very thing when explaining their need to start a new blog – that they needed to write about what they really wanted to write about, and to get a better fit by moving away from the constraints of their previous blog.
My main blogging is about business. I work to build traffic. This blog is for me. I work to put words, sentences, paragraphs, and, occasionally, poems or stories, together.
by Timberry on March 7, 2009
M sent me an email yesterday citing Judith Warner’s Being and Mindfulness, on the New York Times. Very well written. I envy that. The title is less interesting than the implied title in its URL: “the worst buddhist in the world.” In the text, however, she cites a book with that same title.
This bothered me:
Then she described how, on another day, she’d managed not to bite off the head of a woman who’d been gratuitously mean to her 8-year-old daughter, but instead had stayed in the moment and had connected and been able to join with the woman in an experience of their common, sadly limited, humanity.
Say, what? (or, perhaps, the correct expression is WTF; or M’s Madrileno version, QTF) I don’t think that particularly passiveness is praiseworthy. Why didn’t she join with her daughter in experiencing her pain at the hand of some stranger who had no right. Our author is ambiguous.
I was beginning to wonder what body snatcher had taken my cranky friend away and left this kindly, calm, pod person in her place.
Later on, she redoubles the mindfulness-mindlessness confusion with this story:
I saw this very clearly the other day, in a chance email exchange with my friend D.
She had written me to share some anxieties about the recession. They were very real and very pressing, and in the past, I would have responded with very pertinent examples of how things were much worse for me.
This time, however, tapping into great human reserves of calm and centeredness, I tried instead to lead her into staying with her feelings.
“Hang in there. Things will be O.K.,” I wrote.
D., my oldest friend, has not in the past been shy about implying that there’s something inward-looking and self-indulgent about my professed attempts at being-present-in-the-world. Now she wrote back in outrage, “What did you do with the real Judy? Did you just tell me to hang in there, things will be O.K????”
“It is comforting to me when people say things like that, sorry. SORRY!” I screamed back. “There, is that O.K.?”
And it was O.K. The connection — 43 years of happy shouting — was restored.
But it’s not OK with me. Why does she associate a quick platitude with staying with her feelings? Mindfulness = mindlessness again. Where does that association come from?
As with the kindly pod person comment above, she remains instrutably ambiguous:
Some of us experience our emotions always in capital letters and exclamation points. This isn’t always pleasant but, to go all mindful for a moment, it is what it is, and if you are one of these people then probably one of the great pleasures of your life is finding others like you and settling in with them for a good rant. A world devoid of such souls can be cold and forbidding, and above all terribly, terribly dull.
