"We need to chase down our authentic core. Every time we unearth a clue, every time we discover a piece of the puzzle that is “us”, we must chase it. We can’t just ignore what we know to be true about ourselves."
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truth
Hemmingway once said "write drunk edit sober," which I love. Not that I often do exactly that, but the idea of freewriting is a strong one - that open-minded, hold-it-lightly, stream-of-consciousness that just plucks words out of the ether and tosses them to the page.
So, this post is a freewrite. I'd normally refine it, simplify it, whatever, but after reading it I thought it would be most authentic to just leave it as is.
Enjoy.
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What if everything is just flowing through us like radio waves all the time?
Energy and creation, messages from God, voices from the past.
And what if most of us, most of the time, were just oblivious to it?
The few who are sensitive to certain frequencies would “see” something that others don’t. They would “feel” something. An intuition, a 6th sense, a premonition, a prophecy.
In the pentecostal church I grew up in, we were encouraged to reach our senses out, stretch our sensitivity to “discern” spiritual movements in the world. And we did, and we felt stuff. We saw things, and heard things, we dreamt dreams and saw visions.
I have a friend who sees feathers. Not “I see dead people.. and feathers” kind of thing, but she just notices them. A feather in the wind, a feather on the ground, a feather in a doorway. She is very aware of feathers, and she assigns meaning to them. It's never just a happenstance, when a feather appears. The moment is elevated, and my friend feels seen and known by forces greater than herself. I see way more feathers now too.
I have another friend who feels the darkness someone else is holding. He says it's like a black wave, like ink, and when he gets that feeling be becomes more interested in the person, more attuned to their words, their fears and masks. And when the time is right, he calls it out. He asks them about their darkness, and they respond with surprise and relief, and they leave with a lot less ink in their waters.
I’ve been wondering whether this might actually be the masterplan for us humans: That we each see different things, interpreting the same event in an entirely unique and personal way, so that together we can be a full-spectrum community. I see X in that event, and you see Y, and instead of arguing that only one is correct, we consider that both frequencies are valid. An attitude like this would allow us to paint all the dimensions of something that would otherwise be limited to our single-perspective shape.
Like, if a giant cylindrical pyramid landed on its side in the desert, and there were two groups of people, one at the south end, and one at the west end. Those in the south would declare that what they see in the distance is absolutely a circle. Those in the West would say it’s definitely without a doubt a triangle. If neither group moves, then no amount of conversation between them would result in a change of opinion. They both have the absolute truth, and therefore the other options must be false.
It’s a dimension thing, and a perspective thing.
The solution of course is simple. Somebody leaves their fixed viewpoint and takes a journey of discovery. They do a lap of the cylindrical pyramid and realise that there are other dimensions in play. And when they return, they can share with the others the new, broader, wider truth:
That both sides were true, and neither had the whole truth.
But in our lives, we often can't move. We're stuck in our spots, and when we hear of new perspectives it's very hard for us to shift our understanding to believe it. Even when someone who has taken that journey of discovery explains it to us. But I think it's our unique privilege to try.
Perhaps what makes us human is our ability to intuit, to NOT take a “fact” at face value. To ask of everything, not “what is happening?” but “what do I make this mean?”
To incline our hearts towards the radio waves, and allow everything flowing through us to have a voice.
In story, we know that truth is NOT the facts. Nobody really cares about the facts. The audience is not here for the facts. That is just information. What the audience is most interested, in, and what we all actually need the most from each other, is an understanding of what we made the facts mean.
Meaning is not found in a list of facts, but in every unique and differing perspective of humanity. None of us alone can build a complete picture of our world.
We need each other.
In my late teens, I discovered the wonderful world of gossip.
At the time I had no idea that that was what I was engaging in, but it absolutely was. I had friends who told me things, in private, to be kept secret, and I had other friends who asked me things about those private conversations. And when I shared these little details, my listeners became deliciously attentive. A sinister and attractive connection arose between us, where I would share information, and they would respond in wonder and delight.
“Nathan, you’re good friends with Beth, hey? Has she told you who she has a crush on? Is it Michael?”
“Uh, yeah, she’s been flirting with Michael, but he’s not the one she actually likes.”
(Gasping) “Oh reeeeally? Then, who is it? It’s so cool that you know, when none of us do!”
“Well, it’s Ben. She actually loves Ben, and is just using Mike to get closer to Ben.”
“OMG! Wow. Isn’t that so interesting? And gosh, poor Michael, because, doesn’t he like her??”
“Yeah, he does. He’s in love with Beth, but she’s in love with Ben, and.. you know what?”
“Yes? What?”
“Ben just told me he's is in love with Kate.”
“Noooooooo!!!”
“Yeah.”
And so on. I didn’t even consider the moral fallout. At 16 years old, I was still new to this world, I was still learning, I was naive. I was firmly in the present moment, and every other moment was just collateral damage.
These conversations went on for months, I’m ashamed to say. Beautiful faces with nice-smelling hair were paying me so much attention, actively seeking me out, pulling me aside, asking me what I know about others. And every time I shared something, their eyes would grow wide, their delicate hands would stroke my arm, and I felt warm feelings everywhere.
I had no idea that with each interaction, I was building an identity for myself. That I was becoming someone untrustworthy.
Anyway, with all the attention, and the warm feelings, and the pretty faces, I was never going to change. I was a wide-eyed deer enjoying all the shiny headlights. Until Maddie-day.
It was a weekend, and we had just finished our usual catchup: my friend Maddie is innocently asking me all about my friends’ secrets, and I'm spilling the beans. But then, instead of giving me the warm eyes and arm-strokes I’d become accustomed to, she goes dark. She pauses, with this smug smile on her face, and says bluntly,
“Nathan, you know that none of us girls would ever share our own secrets with you, don’t you?"
And it was my turn to go wide-eyed. I didn’t know what to say, but my foolish 16-year-old face forced a smile, and I asked “Why is that?”
“Because, dear, you are a gossip. All the girls just talk to you because you tell them your friends’ secrets. No one here actually trusts you at all.” She smiles again, gives a little “and that’s that” shrug, and trots off.
I was stunned. Every conversation from the past six months crowded back into my brain, and I started piecing together the looks, the hugs, the interest, and all the words I spoke so foolishly. She was right, of course, but in that moment all I could think was “Maddie is so mean. So rude. I hate her.”
I walked away, and stopped talking to her. But, I also stopped talking to everyone else too. The next time someone asked me to share some secrets, I would simply say “ah, that is a very good question, and one that is not mine to answer!”
For a long while, I didn’t get the excited looks from the pretty faces with nice hair. I didn’t get arm-rubs and eyelash-batting. I just wasn’t interesting anymore.
After another long while, things started to change again. New faces would lean in, and whisper their confessionals. I would nod sometimes, and cry with them sometimes. It became my hand that rubbed their shoulder, my eyes that grew wide, my head that would shake slowly. A soft trusting connection would form, and it was now me trying to make them feel warmer.
I really don’t know what made Maddie say what she did. I despised her for saying it, but in hindsight I see a deep intuition that neither of us were old enough to own. As painful as her words were to me, they were true, and they saved me.
I realise now that what I was doing was what story theorist Robert McKee would describe as “flexing emotions.” He explains that stories resonate in us because we all want to "visit another world, and be illuminated." We want to "use our minds in fresh and experimental ways, flex our emotions.” A story is a safe place for us to exercise all of the feelings, because in the end, it’s not really happening to us, but we can hold the feels for a while.
What the naive 16-year-old me was trying to do was really the same thing: I was holding other people’s relationships, feelings, lives. I was flexing my emotions vicariously through other humans' stories, like a commentator at a football game who never actually picks up a football. What Maddie did was force me into my own story. I had to experience my own emotions, with all the highs and lows that go with them. It was far more difficult than running commentary, but also, more rewarding.
Reading a great book, or watching an engaging TV series, or scrolling through everyone else's social media stories, all help us to flex our emotions. We visit another world, and try to find some illumination. Spending time listening and retelling each other's stories is exactly the same: we are in another's world, and vicariously feeling what they feel.
Our challenge, in fact one of our greatest challenges in life I believe, is to know what to do with the story once we have heard it.
A below-the-line response to a story is passive, reactive, gossip. We sit back and enjoy it all, and then we might perhaps reshare it, someone else's moment, and pretend that their feelings are ours.
But, an above-the-line response is entirely different. It's active. It seeks meaning and connection and illumination. It makes it personal. When it reshares, it doesn't need to share the story verbatim, but the insights gained from the story.
Stories are not meant to provide an ESCAPE from life. They are meant to help us FIND life. To find new perspectives and emotions and insights for our own lives and relationships. The goal of the storyteller has always been AUDIENCE TRANSFORMATION, and in our real lives, we can actively choose that path: every story we hear can transform us. From cinema hits to heart-journeys of loved ones, we can visit these other worlds, flex our emotions, and bring back some illumination.
And that illumination is ours, it is truth, and is exactly what the world does need to hear from us.
Thank goodness, a blank page.
My mind has just been racing through pages and pages of news and social media, and I’m exhausted and on edge. It’s not that I’m reading disturbing information - mostly they are fun articles, entertaining stories and interesting facts - but there is an undercurrent of panic that slowly rises through my limbic system, the longer I scroll.
But now, here is a blank page, and it feels like I can finally take a full breath, taste actual air, and set my compass again to the stars above me.
My life is filled with hustle. And beauty. Excitement, conflict, moments of wonder, moments of peace. At the end of many of my days, I don’t feel ready to go to bed. I feel like I want to achieve more, shine brighter, love deeper, write better. I want to do all the things I’m here to do, become everything I’m called to be.
But then I pick up my phone, and start scrolling, and start sinking. My screen is like oxygen when I’m underwater. Sinking into the deep, I take short sharp breaths of instagram, a quick shot of high-octane news updates, and tell myself that this is air.
But that small voice of truth tells me it is not air. It says "you are being entertained, but you cannot see the stars anymore."
This honestly isn’t a rant against social media. Before we ever had screens and internets, we were still finding ways to distract ourselves. At the dawn of the written word, Socrates was arguing that our memory would be weakened by reading - that words on parchment are a weak substitute for lively in-person connection. We've always had the challenge of curating the myriad inputs of our lives for meaning, not just for pleasure.
And I’m also not encouraging you to “do more” or “be better” or any of that. You are doing great. Your life is your life and you are daily discovering more about it and yourself. You're okay.
This is really about staying present, and finding the meaning. There are so many shiny distractions in life, and I find it the most difficult thing in the world to stay clear, and afloat.
I’m adding another metaphor now, but it honestly feels like this:
I am on a stage. It is open, expansive, clear. The floorboards are a rich mahogany and I can dance on them, any way I want.
I am present, acutely aware of my environment, my place in it, the players who will join me for different scenes. We will relate, shine, bond, create. We will share our unique expressions with the audience, who will resonate and respond and celebrate each act.
But then, my phone buzzes, an exciting distraction pops up, or a concern, a fear, a responsibility, a deadline, and I’m gone. My brain exits stage left, heads into the audience, and takes a seat. It stares back at my empty shell, motionless on those mahogany boards, and reaches for the popcorn.
I know not everyone responds like I do - I have friends who are amazing at instantly metabolising information, from any source, into really meaningful conversations, in real-time. But I don't do that - I just end up disengaging. Drowning in the data.
I think that’s why the panic comes. It’s a lump in my throat, a whisper in the back of my mind that says “betrayal.”
Quitting the stage is the deepest betrayal, because I am quitting myself. Instead of actively engaging with life, in all its conflict and beauty and whimsy and power, I am choosing to just be entertained by it.
“Distraction” is the antagonism to traction. Forward motion. In any story, the Antagonist is there to force the Protagonist to change, grow, make decisions.
I think when distractions come our way, we need to be really, really aware of our “traction” - Where am I heading? What do I believe? What will keep me moving towards that North Star?
Because the battle of our lives is right here, in the holding of the course, the mindful forward-motion that daily asks all of us to stay on the stage, to play our parts, to leap and shine and reflect our truth to the rest of humanity.
This week, I spent a lot of hours writing a thing. I had an idea, and was focussed on sharing it, pushing my opinion, convincing my readers that the idea is true. I was going to post it today.
But then I read it. And then I trashed it.
I realised that I was writing so that others would agree with me. Like-minded others who would rally to my side, while I shared a polaric opinion about something I honestly didn’t know enough about.
There is a great difference, it turns out, between being like-minded and being like-hearted.
Like-minded people gather together and agree, and rant against those that disagree. We form groups and sides, and double down on our beliefs and stances and our right-ness.
Like-hearted people, in contrast, gather on the plain of love, acceptance, and difference. We believe different things on the surface, we can disagree, and have totally unique life experiences. But we stay together to learn from each other: perspectives, opinions, wisdom from other angles.
I often find it difficult to engage with a single-minded writer. They either have me on their side, or they don't, and then they are just trying to convince me of something. That's fine for a science paper, but it's not STORY.
Storytelling is all about like-heartedness. All writers have deep beliefs and opinions, but the great ones never explicitly need to share them. They wrap their world views in a trojan horse of shared narrative experience, allowing their audience to walk with them and draw their own conclusions in their own time.
Storytelling invites everyone in. It may seem like the softest tool of revolution, but it honestly has the most power to actually change someone’s mind. Living like-heartedly means you don’t have to convince, win or own. You just have to invite, and listen, and share the stories.
I’ll be honest with you, I’m a dreamer. I have an over-optimistic worldview that has often been criticised in the past. I’ve been attacked for being ignorant, for not having appropriate concern for reality, for not behaving logically, rationally, maturely. I’ve been told that I hope too much, that I believe in impossible things. That I’m too whimsical and romantic for real life.
While the engineers are building bridges, I’m the artist swimming in the sea.
Ever since I was little, I’ve seen the world with filters. I’m sure everyone has - The filters of their culture, upbringing, beliefs, values. My filter was spiritual, and magic, and wonder, and love. I grew up looking at the world through whimsy-coloured glasses.
I just don’t see why it’s so bad to rewrite our reality. When I was working the corporate office life, I would catch a train every morning, during peak hour. We’d all be jammed in like sardines, pressed up against shoulders and backpacks and windows, with all sorts of strange smells and sounds. The “reality” of that scene is pretty dull. A daily-nine-to-five-grind-get-me-out-of-here-as-quickly-as-possible reality that we're all familiar with.
I remember it a little differently:
It’s 6:23am and the sun has just made it up, but already it's lost behind cloud. The morning was chilly enough for a jacket, and my collar is still popped from the raw winds on the platform. I’m pressed up against the window now, right in a corner, with barely enough space to turn a page. Under my nose is an issue of Kinfolk, it’s clean page layouts a wide-open field to me. Tiny words and a heap of white space.
I’m reading an article about slow living, written by Carl Honoré, and it’s fascinating to me. In my mind, the world has slowed, vignetted away so that I am a rock in a stream, untouched by the eddies around me. I turn a page, my arms all praying-mantis-like, while even more people cram into the carriage and I am pushed further into the window.
And then all of a sudden, two things happen together: Our train reaches the bridge over the river, and the morning sun breaks through the low cloud. Vintage golden light is splashed over my page, over the shoulders and hats surrounding me, dancing over the river below us.
I look up from my magazine and squint into the light, and imagine it to be a cloud of magic, a portal between times, a conversation between God and me, and anyone else listening.
I breathe it in - the light, the warmth, the smell of eternity. I hear messages in the cloud - of love, of hope, of peace. It tells me that life is beautiful. Every moment of life is magic. Each scene is interesting.
And then it’s gone. Our train has crossed the bridge and is heading underground, the light is replaced by darkness and screeching of brakes on rails. But I feel like that moment saturated me, and ten years later I’m still damp with the sunlight.
CS Lewis writes that myth and fantasy are not retreats from reality, but rediscoveries of it. He says that when we dip reality into story or myth, it becomes more savoury, we see it with clarity and wisdom. The real things become more themselves.
When I dip reality into whimsy, I see things afresh. The dullness of familiarity is washed away, and I rediscover a life of joy, hope, purpose and meaning.
We are artists. In ancient times, it was the artists who society looked to for hope and perspective. The artist saw the world differently to the worker or the politician, and so, could offer valuable insight into a situation. And perhaps more importantly, the artist could also offer an archetype of a solution.
Artists naturally reveal truths, often universal truths. And in doing so, their audience feel two things:
They feel known.
They feel hope.
It’s not up to the artist to implement cultural change, manage new systems, oversee task forces. The artist simply creates pieces of truth, that move an audience towards something they believe in.
“Rachel Callander, award-winning photographer, gives up wedding photography to evangelise the Health System.”
“Nathan Maddigan, award-winning photographer, gives up wedding photography to persue authentic story craft.”
It doesn’t matter, really. What the papers say. What the fans say. What the critics say.
What matters, is that we chase ourselves.
What I mean is, every day of our lives, we are learning more about ourselves, what we love, what we believe in, what we despise. And the more we learn, the greater the responsibility to act.
We need to chase down our authentic core. Every time we unearth a clue, every time we discover a piece of the puzzle that is “us”, we must chase it. We can’t just ignore what we know to be true about ourselves.
I’ve done it, the ignoring-my-true-self thing. I experience a moment of revelation, of what I truly love in life, where I actually want to put effort in to achieve. And then I shut it down. I’m afraid of the work, or of failure, or of success. So I push it down, and ignore it.
And when I do that, I shrink a bit. I become smaller, weaker. And I’m reminded of Viktor Frankl’s words,
“When a man cannot find meaning, he numbs himself with pleasure.”
And I’m reminded to return to the chase, keep learning, trying, changing. To not give in to the fear or give up for the comfort. To honour everything that is weird/unique/different in me, honour the calling, and to keep chasing.