Be Generous
To those who draw,
To those who sing ,
To those who write ,
To those who create,
To those who are,
Be generous.
There is this fear that anyone who has ever endeavored and created or made something has had. The fear is, what if this is the best one and only one I have in me. Will I have another? I remember sitting on stories for months cuddling them like Smeagol holding the ring( my precious), you would need a wrench to pull them out of my hands. I thought I couldn’t come up with anything better, they were all I had in me. What I forgot to ask myself was, what’s the point if only I read these stories. After getting guts also known as overwhelming pressure from close friends I finally posted and shared. And at that moment they were not only mine but also whoever reads. For the first hours, I buried my head like an ostrich in the sand. But I couldn’t resist to peak and to my surprise people didn’t want to burn my house down. They liked it, of course, they did it was the best I had to share. I thought I was done for, what else could I write, would it even be good. Was it a fluke?
After practicing social distancing from my notebook for a couple weeks I sat with it. The ideas didn’t come, and my fear was coming true. And after what felt like the infinity of waiting for your food in a restaurant I wrote a line. I left it and did that over a couple days and finally got to something that wouldn’t make people roll their eyes or throw up. Then I did it again and again, missing more times than landing, but it seemed like the 5 people who read most of my posts were getting something out of them, so I kept writing. The more I wrote the more I realized that I was not dipping into a finite well but more like fetching from a river. The more I shared the more stories and ideas I had. Some came easy and others took extreme effort but they kept coming. And now there were 6 people(excluding family of course) who genuinely enjoyed and benefited from the slightly more palatable chicken soup I was serving. (Side note: chicken soup here means cheesy heartfelt motivational stories, the phrase is commonly used in China).
Give more get more, huh. Seems to be counterintuitive but it’s true. If you do not let out how can more come in. It is like eating and never going to the bathroom, it’s only biology. Same for investing, relationships, and so on. So if you are generous with your ideas and creations, you will get more of them. If you sit on the only ones you have they will be the only ones you have. But if you are generous you are tapping into an infinite river.
And as an added benefits people will get to see more of your work which helps them more than most things. So be generous, create and share more so that your river can start to flow. We aren’t reservoirs where ideas and experiences come to die but rather conduits that transfer them into the world. Where they belong.
