If not now, when?
To speak up? To stand up? To take a chance? To risk? To love? To discover? To explore? To learn? To lead? To follow? To be known? To know others? To investigate? To stretch? To get dirty, messy, uncomfortable? To live with hopeful realism?
We are living in an age of relentless trauma. I’m not saying that hope is lost, that good won’t win over evil or that the sky is falling. I don’t know. None of us know. And I am not an alarmist. I am paying attention. The trauma is real. And if you have the freedom to act there is no better time than now.
The arc of my personal development has long bent toward learning how to freely express my feelings. I adapted to my own set of childhood experiences by learning not to risk abandonment or loss. A good way to do that is to not say things that might upset people.
The learning has been steep and treacherous but I have found that good people, thoughtful people…close friends in particular, many of my clients, my girlfriend/fiancée/wife of 28 years, my children…appreciate my kind and thoughtful candor. There was a time that seemed impossible. And that has happened as I have learned to receive their kind and thoughtful candor in return.
As far as I’ve come, I have to do better. The moment demands it and I choose to meet the moment. There will never be a more important time in my lifetime to practice being better at what I find is the hardest thing to do: to live into a more authentic version of the freedom I so cherish; the freedom to speak up, to speak with integrity, to speak with love. The freedom to both express and receive the painful, unpleasant and hard to acknowledge real stuff of this time and place.
DAVID BERRY is the author of “A More Daring Life: Finding Voice at the Crossroads of Change” and the founder of RULE13 Learning. He speaks and writes about the complexity of leading in a changing world.
