Serving Life
A few years after I started this magazine, I was asked to interview Radanath Swami who had published a memoir about his journey from his childhood in Chicago to becoming a Hindu teacher and religious leader in India. I’d never heard of him, and I was initially approached by what could only be described as his followers, which put me off, frankly. Once I got to know the man himself, however, I liked him very much and he seemed to like me, and we ended up having some great conversations about creativity and spirituality and the interesting ways our lives take shape.
He returned to Seattle a year later, and I was invited to have lunch with him at a home in Bellevue. He was meeting with some students when I arrived, and I sat in the kitchen with one of his attendants, who described what it was like to travel with the swami as he spoke to groups around the world.
“When he teaches,” the attendant explained, “he mostly tells stories. Often the same stories. I’ve heard him tell them again and again, except they keep changing. Not in a bad way. It’s like the story changes depending on who he’s talking to, and the way the tells it always seems to fit perfectly with what they need. It’s quite amazing.”
During lunch, the swami and I got to talking about suffering. Whether you write essays about getting in the flow for an online writing magazine, or you have ten thousand students at an ashram in India, you will spend a fair amount of time exploring why people are so often unhappy and why they tend to treat each other so poorly. “It seems to me,” I said, “that it’s never the thing that happened. That’s never why we’re really suffering. It’s always the story we tell ourselves about the thing that happened.”
The swami nodded and then shrugged. “So, tell better stories.”
I had to agree. It occurred to me as I drove home that a good story is always in service to the one who’s telling it and the one who’s hearing it. Because I don’t know who’ll be reading my stories, I make sure they’re in service to me as I write them and assume they’ll find their way to the readers who need them. I admit that sometimes I fret that this isn’t enough, that I need to do something more than merely satisfy what I desire on any given day. I don’t, however, know what that would even be. How could I? If I’m writing to serve myself, then I’m also serving life, and that’s all and all and all there is.
If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.
Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com