Who are your heroes?
After reading Derek Sievers’ blog about heroes (http://sivers.org/heroes), I decided to follow his suggestion to blog about mine, plus, I’d love to hear who yours are.
When I was five I saw the German version of the movie “The Song of Bernadette,” and have wanted to be a healer and a saint ever since. (Well, it took about 45 yrs to “own” it.) And many, though not all, of my heroes are in line with that wish. Even though I was a singer/songwriter, I looked to Mother Teresa for her stoutness of mind and heart, and to Gandhi for believing the impossible was the possible that just hadn’t been tried yet.
Later I graduated to Deepak Chopra who made India’s wisdom and spirituality accessible to this Western mind, Neile Donald Walsh for confirming with audacity that I could, indeed, have a conversation with god, Doreen Virtue who wrote about awakening one’s spiritual power and knowledge of healing in “The Lightworker’s Way,” (a power that had gone dormant from my in ability to tolerate ridicule), and Carolyn Myss who believes everything is spiritual. Other heroes are Malcolm Gladwell, whose “Blink” is a love letter to human intuition, Daniel H. Pink for showing in A Whole New Mind that the next wave (we’re in it) is the “Conceptual Age,” Robert Wright (Nonzero), who so exquisitely, soberly, and expertly lays out his belief that the arrow of life’s history points toward genuine improvement, based on its, as he believes, propensity toward non-zero sum games. Then there is Twyla Tharp, who introduced “scratching” for ideas in support of one’s creativity in her book The Creative Habit, and Martin E.P. Seligman who in Authentic Happiness, began to catalogue the indicators of health (rather than the indicators of sickness, as the healing professions are wont to do), and turned my understanding of health inside out, refocusing my attention from “what needs to be fixed” to what is working (in my opinion the magic bullet). And, lastly, there is Thomas Moore’s “Soul of Sex” with its revelatory assertion that Eros is the foundation of all of life. Wow, still… and Jill Taylor Bolte for making neural networks crystal clear, and, thus, sorting out untold self-help questions and confirming the “euphoric ocean of life” in which we swim.
Well, two more: S.I. Hayakawa and Alan R. Hayakawa for stating in the first chapter of Language in Thought and Action (Ch. Language and Survival, What animal shall we imitate?) that survival of the fittest doesn’t necessarily mean we are, and must be, brutes by nature, that rabbit, deer, earthworm and mole, too, are surviving splendidly.
And, of course on his own list stands my darling love, Steven, who is my own hero :)
Thank you to Derek Sivers, for this opportunity to become present this morning to so much wonderfulness. Of course, the list is one that grows endlessly, as each person on the planet, being a junction in the great web of life, is a hero and contributes to who I am and am becoming. Thank you for being such a junction, shining bright as a star in the firmament of my world.
Dear reader, feel free to leave a message, describing whom your heroes are, or maybe even blog about it. Who knows who might become inspired…
Namaste,
India