Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself.”
Be myself? That’s totally impossible in a world where 87% of us are actors playing the best available scene in a movie called Survival. The other 13% represent our often ignored, shove it behind the nearest picture frame national unemployment rate.
Like Larry David, employees are given no script, direction and or inspiration, the masses are told where to stand and please do everything within your ability to participate with the process by making sure the carefully researched yet unrehearsed scene doesn’t need to be re-cut. That requires time and time is still more valuable than water or Starbucks.
Some employees have low budget speaking roles while others voluntarily show up in the extremely important background doing nothing more than reacting to the characterization of realization when events begin to unfurl like Meg Ryan’s restaurant lines in When Harry Met Sally.
Gasp! Oh my! Wow! As long as we’re not seeing bubbles over our heads that read, “Punch, boom, pow, zoom and zoinks.” I guess we’re ok.
What was Ralph thinking when he invited people to be themselves?
Lee Iacocca thought for himself. In an age when John F Kennedy ushered in the idea that our nations young people have a voice and the power to make the best and right decisions, the Ford Motor Company took a shot and gambled on a nearly tossed away presentation that invited consumers to invest in being youthful and different. Lee gave us the Mustang.
Openly I admit...I grew up believing I had the meanest parents on earth—being head of the household gave them veto rights. I spent many summer days ripping down houses in the old districts of Billings, Montana because the father figure believed it was cheaper to take the wood from something built in 1924 then rush out and buy it from Hoinky Doinky Lumberyard.
His decision to keep me from playing baseball, football and girl watching built a mindset that looks at everyday and sees a positive in every job created—even if you’re an assistant teacher at a community driven school, being true to its presentation not only reaches out to a budding American but it finely tunes the craft and tools required to make your way through a fog bank nicknamed recession or depression.
Joe has always been himself and he has no problem telling you what’s on his mind. Even while bowling, did he listen to the coaches that begged him to slow down his approach to the foul line? No! He threw that ball so hard we’d receive phone calls from Seattle asking if they can throw it back. Outside of Earl Anthony on the Pro Bowlers Tour, I had never seen anybody roll so many 200 plus games.
So why aren’t we listening to the elders? The only masters we know that have the knowledge to bake a thought within the realms of keeping it real and we’ve chosen as a modern society to sell out, give life away like it’s the single toy at a garage sale that won’t budge unless you make it part of a packaged deal.
Is that what life has become? A packaged deal? Here’s my wife, kids and the dogs…blah, blah, blah…as long as we’re getting a tax break on April 15th we’ll be fine.
This is what author Lou Solomon calls: Speaking from the heart.
Heck yes I get in trouble by being so open. No day passes that I’m not caked with emails and Face Book entries screaming to stop talking about them. Which goes hand in hand with what Master Harris has always preached at Martial Arts University, “If you hear my voice instructing someone and you find yourself thinking that it might be you…the reality of it is…it had nothing to do with you but if it makes you a better person then it was also meant for you.”
That’s the effect that I personally call the echo. How far does an echo travel before it no longer has enough power to change someone’s life and or path? Ralph Waldo Emerson passed away on April 27, 1882. His echo is 128 years old—that’s 875 in dog years…and we all know dogs have better hearing than humans.
Where can we rediscover the self we are? How can we find enough strength in a pool of give it away, give it away to pick ourselves up and wipe the must and dust off our pants and keep walking toward the horizon? If we were born to have this power…how can we be ourselves again?
What better self to be than the set of eyes that stare at you each morning while brushing your teeth? Then again, have you heard what those expressions have been sharing with you lately? I call the conversation in the mirror Yoda talk—your lips never have to move…by believing in the force, you just somehow know what the other is thinking…and that person in the mirror is far worse than father Joe and his mighty way of saying, “Get out there and pull nails from that wood so I can get that stuff up on the my house where it belongs!”
The best way to achieve that level is to speak from the heart. It takes guts and brains to pull your self out of the box. I often wonder how many of us would’ve lived in the 17 and 1800's when some know it all from California spouted, “I found gold in the hills near San Francisco!”
Which person would you have been the go-getting-trendsetter or the person who elected to stay on the east coast because the cable service was better and in some places HBO and The Game Show Network are free? Ever read the true story of Chicago and how the builders of that incredible skyline competed against NYC? They were determined to have the absolute most unforgettable city in the world. While standing on the edge of The Sears Tour you can’t help but believe…they did it.
We aren’t having a tremendous amount of earthquakes during this new millennium…it’s our ancestors rolling over in their graves grumbling something about not having the heart to watch what they busted their backs to create.
Where’s your heart and ability to speak? Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself. Stop reading web pages and start saying something!
Steal my art…
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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