Finding Light
I didn't know Liz Strauss. But I checked out her work over the years and admired her from a distance. She was one of the first ‘social media influencers’ and spearheaded the power of the Web and its ability to connect, shape and inspire. She once said about writing blogs:
Sit down with yourself and be real. Then share what you’re feeling — the topic doesn’t matter as long as it’s close to your heart, filled with your thoughts, and offers some one thing that people can use to find practical meaning.
The rest is practice.
The rest is practice. Buddha, this finding of practicality and then applying it again and again. Practicing. Reworking. Retrying. Trying to get it right.
As in conversation, people sometimes take our meaning in new directions, let us know that they didn’t get what we said, add and change our ideas — in the same way we do when we converse in person.
Blogging is a new genre that requires a new way of writing to open it up to the conversation. We have to put an idea out and be ready to let others take it, make it more, bend it shape, and carry us all in a new direction. It’s incredibly invigorating when we find folks who understand how to move ideas forward that way. It’s the equivalent of flow on the Internet.
Liz passed away this week, far from the Internet but close to the many connections she made throughout the years. I didn't know her, but just knowing of her made the world a little lighter. Knowing she was busy doing the good work. Reading the heartfelt responses of luminaries in her field and reading the long list of her contributions is flow indeed.
That's the job of the Radical Optimist, perhaps: to make the world a little lighter. Liz might say it doesn't take much. A heart on paper. A smile in the air. Letting go. But she always wanted to go deeper than that. She saw herself as a community builder, and for her, the community deserved everything she had. She simply cared more.
If you listen with mind and heart wide open, you’ll see how meaningful it is to add your voice to the conversation that’s changing the world.
Amen to that. And Godspeed.
Bike as found in Stehekin, WA
