What inspires?

"What inspires?" is a question that has rattled around in my mind for as long as I can remember. We read poetry that inspires. We hear tales of success and survival, and they inspire. We set goals and determine desires, and the end result inspires. But what does that really mean? How do we determine what or who is worthy of providing inspiration? Is it a mere feeling that is invoked by the ryhthm of a musical composition? Is it the words, and the tale that is told? Is it the inflection in the voice of a narrator telling a tale of survival? Is it simply human empathy that allows the words, or actions to trigger feelings of "inspiration"?

In my world, for something, or someone to be "inspirational", action must be generated. To put it simply, if you hear something, or read something, or know someone, and you get "that feeling" from their words or actions....yet you do nothing as a result....there has not been true inspiration. Your reaction was simply one of empty emotional response triggered by chemicals that stain the neutrons in the brain. True inspiration requires action.

So, here is my action. I, fairly recently, had the pleasure of becoming the friend of a man who has the power to inspire. However, I feel in my heart, that he is unaware of the power that he holds. He did not rescue an old lady from a burning building. He did not break any world records. He has not given his limbs and his mind in service of his country. He has merely survived. He has survived human weakness, chance of birth, and hatred.

If you would indulge me, for just a moment, I would be grateful. I want you to visualize a small boy, growing up in a vast world. Visualize his clothes, the broad smile on his face, and the streaks of tears on his cheeks when he scrapes his knee on the front steps. He runs into the house, and into the arms of his adoring mother. She sees a future leader in his eyes. She smiles with pride at this new life just waiting to show the world what he is made of. He looks up at her, and never realizes that one day, she will be gone from him. Time seems to stand still, and becoming a "grown up" is millions of ticks on a clock away. He is every child. He is you, and me. His life is just beginning, and he has no idea what the future holds. He has even less of a concept of what the concept of "future" even means. All he cares about is the new record that he can not wait to tear open and hear. He hears the music, and it makes him dance, sing, and dream. His whole world is set to music. He hears the sounds of laughter, and they are the future tones and verses of the music that he dreams to create.

But then, life begins to happen. As we all know, life can be cruel. It can take a child, full of innocence and wide eyed dreams, and make them a bitter and devastated old fool. How easily that can happen in a world full of pain, hate, and a lack of understanding that we are all born exactly the same.

What child did you imagine? Was he a blonde, curly haired, blue eyed boy with denim pants and his favorite team jersey on? Did you see the faces of your own children? Did you go back in time, and see yourself? What dreams have eluded you due to the trappings of life?

I want to ask you if you envisioned a black, homosexual, recovered drug addict. No? Well, that is the adult version of that child. What was once a happy, and innocent child became a man riddled with pain. Life throws us some pretty vicious curve balls. It is difficult to be a black man in our society. It is even more difficult to be a homosexual man in our society. It is painful to lose a loved one, but even more painful to lose the one person who TRULY understood who you are. When that person is gone, a part of you dies too. Only a man of true heart and strength could overcome the pain of having his life planned for him, without say in what society determined him to be. Is it any wonder that someone like him would turn to substance abuse to escape the pain of loss, hatred and broken dreams? What part do WE play in who he became?

So now, I want you to picture an adult man standing alone in a room with hundreds of thousands of fingers pointing at him. I want you to hear hundreds of thousands of voices screaming the words, NIGGER! FAGGOT! HOMO! JUNGLE BUNNY! REJECT! CRACKHEAD! LOSER! YOU DON'T MATTER!

Then I want you to be that man. I want you to look around that room for the one person that you just KNOW will hold you and make it all go away. She isn't there. She is dead. You are all alone. The relationships that you have, are the ones that you have made alone. Those faces are few and far between the pointing fingers and the hateful words.

Would you have the strength to come back from your own weaknesses and accept that you were born to be better than this? Would you have the courage to fight through that crowd and come out on the other side? I don't know if I could. It takes unimaginable strength to survive, not what others do to us, but what we do to ourselves. It takes looking deep inside and finding that weakness, and making that change. Now, what if you are unable to change who you are, by birth. Would you allow that to become your excuse for remaining bitter, hateful, and allowing the pain to consume you? It would be so easy, wouldn't it?

Inspiration takes action. Aaron, you are an inspiration to anyone with the heart and strength of mind to understand how easily you could have become just another statistic. You didn't. You became a man who fought through the pain and the darkness of life, and came out a musician, and a man to be respected. Those who point their fingers should wish for such strength. Maybe what they should do, is lower their fingers, take a long, hard look at who they are. They should know that thier finger is raised, and their voices are screaming, because they do not have the strength to do what you did. THAT would be inspiring.

So, for you, I lower my finger. I take your act of returning from darkness and it inspires me to think about why I am the person that I am. It is not your music, and the lyrics that inspire. It is the man behind those tones and words.

To overcome the weakness inside of yourself, is to overcome the greatest obstacle. It is easy to raise yourself up from what others have done. It is next to impossible to raise yourself up from what you have done.

Lower your fingers. Do what Aaron did. Look into your hearts. Remember the innocence of a child, and don't be just another finger pointing in a crowd. We cannot change this world, until we change ourselves. WE are the composition, WE are lyrics, We are the audience, and WE are the artists. We make this world what it is. It is your choice to be a person of strength, like Aaron, or a person of weakness simply pointing and screaming.

On Aaron's behalf, I will stand outside of that crowded room, and I point my finger at you. I scream in your face, and tell you that you DO NOT have the courage that he does. I call out your weaknesses and your flaws, as dictated by my peers. I humiliate you, and push you to the breaking point, and beyond. I rob you of love, and sanctuary. There are thousands like me. Then I challenge you not to crumble. Can you do it? If you do crumble, can you recover?

I know this man now. I know him AFTER he pulled himself up. I do not know the old Aaron. I only know the result. I also know that I was a pointed finger. I accept my responsibility in what Aaron had to struggle through, and thanks to his inspiration to be stronger that I could, I lower my finger. I stop screaming without compassion. I will not do to you, what WE have done to him.

There will always be unrest and hate in our society. It is a sad reality that we all must face. Aaron faced it alone, and survived. It was a long road, and a painful process. Each and every one of us has travelled that road, in one way or another. How did you come out?

Get your finger out of my face. Lower your voice, and speak to me respectfully. If you do not, I will walk right past you....for Aaron.

Yikes...

THE NEAR-BREAK-UP

Yesterday, I had a late-afternoon coffee with an editor friend. Since I was heading to my shrink afterward, I began telling my friend how I was SICK to death of the way my shrink was constantly encouraging me to dwell on my miserable childhood. And perhaps even more sick of the way that the very method of therapy seems to put me in a position where I am always asking myself: What's wrong with me? In what ways do I suck? And how can I maybe suck a little less? That I was at least equally sick of talking about life more than I was living it, it seemed.

I told her I wanted to stop trying to prevent unhappiness and start trying to make happiness.

I wanted to lighten up!

Anyway, after I left my friend, I waltzed up the 20 blocks to my shrink's office, feeling invigorated to the point of Mary-Tyler-Moore-ness by resolve: After 8 years, I was finally going to tell my shrink it was over! I was going to get that albatross off from around my neck!

And this time, unlike a few times in the past, I knew I wasn't motivated simply by my frustration over my lack of progress or because I was pissed off that my shrink had never suggested I take anti-depressants--which as I've said repeatedly, have really changed my life.

No, I was going to quit because I felt ready to move on, to take the reins, to take more responsibility for improving my life rather than passively depending on her to guide me through it. What's more, I was going to put the money I saved on my sessions to take myself out once a week: to dinner, or to see a performance at Brooklyn Academy of Music, or jazz at Lincoln Center, etc. Woo-hoo! Brilliant! Why hadn't I thought of this before?

And then I got to the office ... and I didn't want to start right in with the bad news ... so I started telling her about the awkwardness of the Saturday night dinner ... and about how I bumped into someone I used to care for a great deal over the last few days and how even just the quickest hug from him as we were both leaving an event tugged at my heart-strings (but is that only because I once thought his love could redeem me, if only I could win it? and is that healthy?) ... and ... one thing and another ... and I didn't go through with it.


http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/dating-blog/when-to-break-up-dump-your-shrink-noise-pollution


I really don't want to poke fun at this person's blog entry, being as he/she has spent the last eight years in therapy, but....

as usual, I am going to do it anyway....

I read this post this morning, and honestly, I could not stop laughing. Honey, who is your shrink? I think that you owe it to the community to make their identity public. Did you check on the wall for one of those framed degrees? You should probably take a look next time you go to break up with her.

You had a good plan going there! What happened?

Let's see if I can work some magic that, apparently, your overpaid shrink was unable to do.

I want you to ask yourself a question. What kind of a person requires someone else to "guide them through their life", and pays them to do so? But, more importantly, what kind of a person takes that money from the forementioned person while telling them to take the reigns in their own life???

Answer to question one: Someone who does not see their own strength and value. A person like this requires constant reassurance and guidance through the winding roads of life. They fear rejection, not having someone to love them, not making enough money, not pleasing their friends and family, and, most likely is a doormat in every relationship they have ever been in.

Answer to question number two: A hypocritical asshole who is getting rich off of others' suffering.

Do I really have to point out that your inablity to "break up" (nice choice of words, btw) with your shrink is the core of the reason that you go to the shrink in the first place? Why in the world would your "friendly neighborhood shrink" want it any other way?

You seriously mean to tell me that you could NOT walk into her office and tell her that after eight years, she sucks at this? That's funny, in an ironic and pathetic kind of way.

I think you should just put a quarter in one of those "fortune teller" machines every morning, and just go with it. It will be cheaper, and equally as effective, being as YOU live your life, therefore she is only guessing at solutions based on what you have told her, and accumulated data acquired through careful "scientific study".

That is all you are, honey. You are another quarter in the fortune teller gimmick machine. You put something in, you get something out. It is worth a quarter? Well, only if it seems to come true. So, you have put thousands of quarters in the machine, and it keeps spitting out prognostications and advice, but yet, the end result is always the same.....please drop in another quarter. Then you just wait to see if it was correct.

Do you NOT realize that YOU control whether or not your future is bright and happy? Why should someone else have to tell you that? How old are you? Listen, everyone has had shit in their lives. That is why this profession of "therapy" even exists. This may come as a revelation to you, but there are people who have lived through worse and come out of it without eight years of wasting time and money on regurgitated stock answers that lead NO WHERE!

Find a good friend who REALLy cares and will listen when you just need to emotionally vomit all over them. They are a rarity these days, but they do exist. Have a nice, relaxing day that YOU determine what makes you happy at that moment. Don't forget your past, use it to make you stronger and to guide you and teach others how to live, laugh and love. Make it into a strength instead of a weakness. Allow yourself to fail. You can't have it all, all of the time. Bury your head in your pillow and cry if you need to cry, then get up, look in the mirror and see the puffy red eyes and blotchy skin on your cheeks. Then ask yourself if that is the person you want the world to see. If the answer is as it should be...no. Then get cleaned up, find a reason to smile, and show that smile to the world.

Everything that happens to us, in this life, forms who we are, and who we will become. Don't fear it, but see it for what it is.....just life testing your fortitude.

After eight years, if you still feel as though you are not ready to live your life through your own ability to make decisions and handle the ramifications of them, well then, PLEASE fire that woman, and find someone who will do what they claim is their job....to just be a short term foundational guide....not a dependency.

Speaking of dependency....good luck with those anti depressants. ;)