Soul Mosaic

Disciplined, driven, unrelenting

I’ve been reading a book by Jim Collins called What to Make of a Life. Over ten years, he and his team researched hundreds of people to see how they managed the challenges and moments of truth in life by harnessing what he calls “their encodings.” Those are people’s special innate talents held within and waiting for us to discover them. When used in the right moments and circumstances, those encodings propel us to fulfill our destinies and lead rich, satisfying lives.

He writes the book using the stories of matched pairs of individuals from all walks of life. For each particular life path, he showed how each member of the pair got started, found their way professionally and personally, then confronted a “cliff” — a moment of big change. Using their unique encodings, he showed how even very similar people can navigate transitions in very different ways.

It’s a great book and one I find very uplifting. It is heartening to read how even the likes of John Glenn, Carlos Santana, Admiral Grace Hopper, or Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant can struggle, be enmeshed in a fog of “what next,” even choose poorly, then dig deep within to find their way.

I just finished reading the chapter about writers Toni Morrison and Barbara Tuchman. Morrison, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Nobel Prize in literature, wrote stories about the young black girls that did not seem to exist in any books she had read. So she wrote for herself, to create the stories she wanted to read. Barbara Tuchman was passionate about history and making non-fiction as rich a read as any good novel. Very different women, very different writing. But they were similar in one way.

Both were absolutely passionate about writing. They could not “NOT write. “As Morrison put it, “If all the publishers had disappeared in one night, I would have written anyway.”

And both used the word “compulsion” to describe what drove them to write. It wasn’t self-discipline enforced from outside themselves, but an inner compulsion to keep going for the sheer love and desire to see how their next sentence, paragraph, and story would turn out.

I resonated with these two women because that is exactly the word I would use to describe my attitude toward writing this book — compulsion. I MUST write it. I WANT to write it. I NEED to write it, to follow the story’s lead, to learn what wisdom it will reveal along the way. And I NEED to share it with whoever is supposed to find my story.

So I get up, write, research, and plan every day. And every day I channel a driven energy from somewhere within me. And that energy is always there.

Until lately.