When I encounter a truly helpful thing (reading, music, art, nature, relationship) that I am drawn to—the nature of its descriptiveness of or resonance with something about life—I want to do something with it. I don't to just hold it for myself; I want to, somehow, share it.
My sharing of choice often is to write about it. And, then I can feel a dilemma. The dilemma I feel, often from such encounters, is that what I would share (related to what excites me about them) has in some way already been shared (described, written, etc.). The question that pokes at me is, what value would there be in my simply re-telling of it?
This stops something in me, on a fairly regular basis. And, it shouldn’t. I am missing something here, in the logic of my dilemma. It is like I am believing something about what is necessary (needed) that actually isn’t true. But, let's be honest, I don’t know precisely what that is.
It has been observed that authentic growth, for a person (like me) with the ego-structure of an Enneagram 9, is the ability to not try to protect others from our opinions (which is really just a form of self-protection). As I've mentioned before, this is why it is easier for me just to keep my opinions to myself.
Perhaps, this is related to the reaction I observe from others to opinionated people—how much they resent (often even hate) them. But, this dynamic is partly why I enjoy that thing so much in the first place—when something true is being described or presented, even if in an opinionated way.
Part of the answer to my dilemma is the recognition that, while there is ‘nothing new under the sun’, there are SO many things that people are not aware of—that have been historically forgotten or even unknown.
It is only in the telling (and re-telling) that anything true can be experienced or known—for the first time or the hundredth time by anyone. It's not so much the novelty of something that matters, it's the truth of something that matters. We can speak our truth; more specifically, our encounter with it. What is true needs to be told and it can only be told as a result of our encounter with it.
This should be part of my answer to, or the pathway through, my dilemma.
