Is there any room between the peas and the mashed potatoes?

Every Sunday evening Eric Maisel's weekly newsletter slips silently into my email inbox. Some weeks I read it, some weeks I don't quite get round to it. Whenever I do read it I find something to inspire me for the week ahead, quite often there's an invitation to get involved in Eric's latest project or a call to action to get going on a creative project that's accumulating dust somewhere in a neglected corner of my noggin.

Eric's New Year newsletter was a powerful call to arms, an rally cry which encouraged us all to find a cause we care about and change the world around us by forming our own 'armies of one' as individual activists. Eric's newsletters are usually quite a gentle reading experience but this sabre-rattling missive was something of a wake up call for me. It resonated so wildly with me that I got in touch with Eric straight away to ask him if give me permission to publish it on my blog. He kindly gave me his unreserved permission, so here it is for you to enjoy in full:

"Hello, everybody:

Activism is not a standard career. Zorro, Robin Hood, and Spiderman are not business models. Fighting for a principle is not a job description. You can’t make a living as a whistle-blower—in fact, you’re likely to get crucified. Rebellion in the face of the forces aligned against the individual is ridiculous—and pays nothing. Why bother?

Plus, we’re all very busy.

Some people become accidental activists. The following, quoted by Ernie Shreiber in an Internet posting I received this morning, recounts the story of an inadvertent Canadian whistle-blower:

After Dr. John O'Connor, a family physician who was a visiting doctor to the small northern Alberta community of Fort Chipewyan, reported high levels of a rare cancer in those living downstream from the Tar Sands, the Harper government set out to destroy him.

The family physician never anticipated that speaking out about his concerns would land him in a career-threatening struggle against the federal government with his medical license on the line. "Looking back, it's been a nightmare for me," O'Connor said in an interview. "It's just something I never expected in a million years. I just wanted to be the family doctor that I was when I went up there."

Dr. O'Connor and Andrew Nikiforuk, author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil, were asked to speak at a special parliamentary committee. Expecting to be treated as the experts they were, they were instead ambushed by a gang of thugs. As Nikiforuk recounts, “Both O'Connor and I made a terrible mistake. We assumed that committee members would be interested in rigorous dialogue regardless of political affiliation. Instead, we were subjected to abusive tactics geared to dismiss, discredit and dishonor us.”

Inadvertent activists pay a particularly heavy price because they haven’t enlisted for heroism and, by getting blindsided, suffer a greater shock than someone who enters a war zone of his own volition. On the other hand, because they never enlisted they can refrain from doing it again. Having learned a harsh lesson about how the authoritarian personality reacts to exposure, they can choose discretion over valor. But what about the person who has enlisted?

It is 2011—a new year. If I look at my clients, I would say that not a single one of them has much room of his or her plate for activism. They are trying to create, build a practice, handle family affairs, deal with medical emergencies—a million things, all pressing, all difficult. Where is their room to put a cause on the plate?

Still, we desperately need our armies of one. It is a new year. Is there a cause close to your heart? If so, give enlisting at least a passing thought. You won’t have room for it on your plate—we both know that already—but maybe there is just a little room between the peas and the mashed potatoes …

Have an excellent Sunday!

Best,

Eric"

If you have an interest in writing and/or creativity (and more) then you might want to sign up for Eric Maisel's newsletter.

In this short video below, Eric talks about the importance of persistence and courage for the creative process ... it strikes me that those qualities are ones that will serve us well as activists too:



I was lucky enough to participate in one of Eric's Deep Writing workshops in London a couple of years ago and it was an amazing experience ... I didn't finish writing the book that I worked on during that week but it was such a *huge* relief to get the heavy bones of an unwritten novel, that I'd been carrying around for many years, out of my head and onto the pages ... highly recommended (as are his books - Fearless Creating is a good starting point imho) :)