I had a coffee and lunch catch up with a very close friend of mine the other day. We’ve been friends for many many years. I was explaining the purpose of my book and how it has been very taxing and he stopped me in mid sentence.

It’s very rare that he would do that, he’s a great listener.

He said “I’m confused. You are so focused on this one book? Why?”

I didn’t know how to respond. Of course I am focused on the book I thought. I said I was focused on it because it has been in and around me for so long and I want it to be great, to have some meaning, to be effective, it is my first book and I also want it to sell copies and develop it into a business.

He just smiled, and in a very casual way exposed an inherent flaw in my thinking that now, a few weeks later, has given my mind wings. Here’s what he said.

“I’m confused because what I see, the person who is sitting across from me, is not a single book, but a writer. This is just your writing, some of it, not all of it, it’s just the beginning. You don’t see me stopping at one drawing do you? No, I have done many drawings and I will keep doing them. Your writing will not end here, it will continue. You just have to get this one out and show it to the world, stop trying to make it perfect. Make it the absolute best you can and let it go.”

Wow.

I smiled and went inwards in my thinking then, gob smacked at his reading of me and the situation. How lucky I am I thought, to have been given this gift.

When I was listening to a Rhianna song today I had another realisation around the theme of me being a writer. The song I was listening to by Rhianna was not the totality of Rhianna, it was merely a part of her, a single strand of her and her art.

And it came to me then that I am the same. We are all the same. All of us have our inherent talents and gifts that have to be shared with the world. But not as one book or as one swing of a club or as one plant being potted. They must be in flow, continual, surprising, elemental, and freed from us often.

If we keep these talents hidden, buried within, we lose who we are and we become frail and weak willed. We doubt. We feel less. We turn aside opportunity.

My writing, these words here right now, they are my craft and I am constantly creating them, making them, rolling them around in my mind, kneading them and flouring them like a master chef makes the perfect pasta.

Sometimes the flow is a trickle, a spit in a bucket, and at other times they are an avalanche.

That’s how it goes.

But no matter what, the flow must go on.

My friend has done me such a service it amazes me. Without his comments I may have spent the next two to three years looking for the secret missing ingredient, while all along it’s been right here.

There it is. Just Me.

This piece of advice will always keep me focussed on who I am.

Thank you my friend.

Please, please, please, stay true to your best self and share it with the world. You deserve it. We deserve it.

What will you share with the world? Start by sharing it here?

In honour of your commitment to yourself, peace.

Rob

Il meglio deve ancora venire… The best is yet to come