What if the Art is to Stop Protesting Reality?
“The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.”
— William Wordsworth
It’s natural for us to believe we’re right about what’s wrong, a habit known as moral certainty bias.
The best leaders engage in this much less than the rest of us, yet the inner five-year-old in all of us still wants to rant about what’s wrong, finding comfort in amplifying stories of bad decisions, mistakes, and broken relationships. Unfortunately, this rarely makes us look like leaders.
When we stop protesting the reality of errors, disappointments, and losses, we become more curious about what led to these outcomes—without needing to assign blame. When we stop complaining about others’ personalities, we open ourselves to understanding their gifts and contributions, as well as their fears and insecurities. And when we stop trying to erase our own dark moods, we invite intimacy with life itself.
The art here is to embrace reality—not with the detachment of a scientist seeking only facts, but with the openness of a poet who embraces life as it is: vast, mysterious, and beyond the comprehension of both our inner five-year-old and our inner control freak.
Art lasts because it gives us a language for our inner reality, and that is not a private hieroglyph; it is a connection across time to all those others who have suffered and failed, found happiness, lost it, faced death, ruin, struggled, survived, known the night-hours of inconsolable pain.
