Show Not Tell
I want to start telling less and showing more. Fewer words - not none, but fewer - more invitations and then silence as you pick up where you want the conversation to go.
***
When you read text, you introduce new words into an already-busy mind.
A few words or sentences enter your chaos of thoughts, trying to speak up like a timid child in a room full of grownups who are yelling at one another. They squeak, “pay attention to me” - while other voices ponder what is for dinner or what else needs done in this moment or how much coffee is left.
Words are POWERFUL. I adore them. But in today’s society, where attention comes and goes in mere seconds and fights for space in crowded minds, images have a power of immediacy that can’t be ignored.
If I can present you with an image that introduces a pause into your life, a few seconds where we join together in considering the image before us, then we both have a precious space of silence where we can choose what to create next.
We aren’t held captive by the repeated, habitual thoughts that usually drive our sleepwalking.
***
I’m always struggling with how and why I share what I do. The world is a very noisy place - why add more to it?
The answer I constantly return to is that I’m redirecting us to the awareness and to the conversations I want to be having that are shaping the world in which I want to be living.
I’m inspiring bits of self-awareness and hopefully instilling the desire to take responsibility for creating, moment by moment, the life that you want to be living.
As I said, I love words. But I’m finding it harder and harder to find the right ones.
So I’m trying a different language - simultaneously. Think of it like a captioned video, but in reverse. I’m focusing more on the images instead of asking you to understand my words. I’m offering more photos - realistic and surreal - in order to create a pause in your own mental chatter.
Within that space, I invite you into a different understanding, a different awareness, so that you hopefully return to your next moment ever-so-slightly more self-aware, less in sleep-walking mode, and encouraged to co-create with your environment.
***
This image above evokes so many stories for me.
Of course, it is my family, so many of the stories are personal. But it also tells stories of innocence, of memories of jumping on hotel beds, of complacency and adulthood and technology.
Of duality and the realities of how that duality exists in every moment. Deep stuff from one mundane moment.
What does it bring to mind for you?
Thank you for listening, viewing, contemplating, and, if you feel called, for continuing this conversation…