DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE? OF COURSE YOU DON'T

To write or not to write, that is the question!

Would you believe that I've been at this writing game -- news reporting, commentary, creative story telling, authorship and opinion venues -- for 60 years and it only dawned on me this morning while making my second cup of coffee that absolutely no one else sees the world with my eyes.

Why then would one devote three-quarters of his life to imposing his view, or interpretation of same, on fellow human beings who already have their own unique view of the way things are, or should be?

My first venture into the world of the written word was as newspaper reporter. I relished the idea of passing on "facts" I had garnered about a particular person or details surrounding an event or activity, some of it by means of reinforcement and even more ideally some of it as a source of new information for public consumption.

As I climbed the journalistic ladder, it was inevitable that I be introduced to the role of editorialist which was completely unnatural for me at the time because I had yet to develop the courage of my convictions and the confidence to analyse the news of the day, let alone commit my humble and up-to-then-supressed opinions to print. Convincing myself that my take on issues were as good as the next guy's and that someone was actually prepared to pay me for them was a revolation. I had to approach it as a career challenge and it eventually became a way of life, dare I say an obsession. Always promoting ideas, concepts or schools of thought as a form of public awareness and being naive enough to think that readers would 100 percent buy into my way of thinking, or view -- and totally shattered when that was not the case.

It has taken me all this time to understand that two people may see the same thing, but in reality they will have different interpretations of it. No two people have the same perception as they view or examine issues because they have different experiences in life. We have our own minds and brains, that’s why we create different observations.

According to the site worldtrans.org, perceptions vary from person to person but more than that, we assign different meanings to what we perceive.

"All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery," wrote George Orwell in Why I Write. "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows, that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality."

Orwell’s classic essay touches on a fascinating contradiction at the heart of the writing impulse. We write to hear ourselves think, to attract an audience, to work out our demons. For me, writing is often therapeutic and I feel a compulsion to share my experience with others who may just benefit from it.

At the same time, the writers we love are able to move, entertain, and comfort strangers with relative ease...That's what I call a gift, showing powers of empathy and imagination that seem the very opposite of selfish. I really do not know where I fit in.

Orwell identified four motivations that he believed lie in different combinations in every writer’s heart:

Sheer Egoism: "Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood etc."

Aesthetic Enthusiasm: "Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story."

Historical Impulse: "Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity."

Political Purpose: "Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after."

I certainly have no quarrel with any of that.

I write to satisfy a need within me coupled with an unexplained sense of mission. Sadly, however, I am reaching a stage in life where my ability to meet that need is diminishing.

Whenceforth then, comes my inspiration?

I struggle to come to grips with the fact that in the end I am at the mercy of a reading audience that on a good day has the courtesy to similarly struggle in order to view the world as I see it.

I'm taking it all under advisement over another cup of coffee.