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Dalton
Roberts |
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An email from Bill Littleton reminded me that there are tiny fragments of greatness in each of us. The thought came from him in a strange context. Bill edits a superior newsletter in Nashville called The Bridgeworks. It serves as a network of contact for creative artists of all kinds but mostly those in the music business. It really feels more like entering a grand banquet hall to feast on great ideas. In addition to being a songwriter and musician, he is an actor and this was the context for his email to me. He wrote, “In drama classes we talked about the numerous theories concerning method acting. The one that works for me is to literally find that fragment of me, tiny though it may be, that is closest to the character at hand. Then the process is to exaggerate and expand that fragment and isolate it from all the other ‘yous’ so that you really are that character.” The main thing that jumped out at me was that some of our areas of greatness reside in us as tiny fragments. Just as an actor would seldom develop those facets unless the chance came for a starring role, we rarely bring them out unless we are offered a job in which we have only a tiny fragment of interest or ability. Then we are often surprised at our success in that line of work. I think of my own mother and all the tiny fragments she discovered in her long and productive life. She did not love housework but she was a wonderful homemaker. As one of Edgar Guest’s poems proclaims, “It takes a heap of living in a house to make a home.” Some of those are mixing love in cornbread, showing your children the beauty of helping those less fortunate, teaching lessons in life with a sensitive heart rather than a sledgehammer, and addicting your family to birds and trees. This makes a housewife into a homemaker. She was a novelist, poet, a mother to the orphaned, and the person most often called upon to be with neighbors who were dying. There was no overarching single passion or purpose evident in her life but she literally found all kinds of tiny fragments in her being that were worthy of development. A friend who spent his life as a millwright recently brought me the union dues book of my father. My sister saw it and remarked, “I never knew Dad was a millwright.” She knew he was a carpenter, plumber, electrician, auto mechanic, preacher and teacher but the first time she knew he had found that tiny fragment of a millwright was when she saw that dues book. In his quote, Littleton tells us how these things happen in our lives: “…the process is to exaggerate and expand that fragment and isolate it from all the other ‘yous’ so that you really are that character.” The reality of living is that we are sometimes called upon to delay our greatest dream to do jobs where we only have a small interest or talent. But if life places us in these positions we will find that our success depends completely on exaggerating and expanding that tiny fragment. One phrase in Littleton’s email really hit home: “…isolate it from all the other ‘yous’ so that you really are that character.” That’s exactly what I did when I ran for office. Politics was not my dominant interest in life. It was indeed a tiny fragment. But when I decided to run, I was 100% politician until election day. I even gave up music for six months to exaggerate and expand my tiny fragment of politics. If life is forcing you away from your dominant interest for a while, do not fight it. See it as a chance to find the tiny fragment of your being that knows how to do that job. You are much too magnificent to ever think you can only do one thing.
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