Finding your voice

It could be argued that is why we have such an obsession with celebrity and why so many young and not so young, clamour madly for their fifteen minutes of fame. They just want to be heard. To be felt that what they say is important and they envy those who have that platform. The irony is we all have ‘that platform’, we just need to find what our particular platform is, get in touch with our own unique truth and express it. Then we can leave happily. Our ghosts need not lurk the corridors.

But finding your voice is not the easiest of tasks. We are all conditioned differently by our experiences and what may seem simple for one can prove difficult for another and the reasons may never be clear. It’s just the way life is – ambiguous at best, never just black and white. So we paint, we perform, we read bad poetry aloud in the streets. Or we do cool things, like stand up in a comedy club and accept the grateful cheers of the audience as they repond to our observations and insights.

We do all of the above, we cook, we clean, we make wax candles and finish large jigsaws. We are expressing something of ourselves in these things, and its never just once and then finished. We continue doing so, finding vehicles for our emotions, until they finally force us into the coffin, and then we ponder.

We ponder if we did the right things, or was there a more right thing we should or could have done?. We wonder what right means and if its all just a subjective puzzle in our heads, who then is the judge? Perhaps there are many judges, all of them different, changing when we change.

With these thoughts we live our lives. These are the thoughts that make us want to paint, make us want to write bad poetry and recite it to a reluctant audience. Because that is what humans do. I used to think that your voice was something you found once and for all, and then grabing hold of it you set to work churning out authentic painting after even-more authentic painting, if such a painting could exist.

But unfortunately its not that simple, you get up the next morning and open the box where you hid your authentic voice the night before and its gone! Someone must have gotten in and stole it! You begin the search and start the interrogation of your loved ones. They ignore you since they know you and leave you skulking upstairs considering where you last saw it.

Finally giving up the search, you begin again promising to leave it somewhere safe after you’ve finished with it and the painting is complete, but lo and behold the same thing happens and the cycle continues. You accept the inevitable and each day paint from a different place, just as you live each day from a different place, ignoring all the while the shuffling in the wings. Your time on the platform is short use it well.

(This article was written while high on the poetry of Billy Collins)