Blog | Justin Mulvaney

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about one simple question or, more accurate, one simple word: why.

Modern advice points broadly to one fact: know your why. Stated without any means to getting there, as if this is a simple task!

Getting to know your why seems like a task for a lifetime in itself. Why do you get out of bed in the morning? Why do you eat? Why do you speak? Why do you speak what you speak? Aside from simply being a conscious being programmed to survive, why do you do what you do?

Solely art and not-at-all science, the answer comes from relentless self-exploration, discovery, and creation. There is no blueprint. There is only comfort & discomfort, knowing & not-knowing, infinite presence and mindfulness and development.

Also a brutal honesty- the ability to admit you don’t know your why and to continue anyway. An utter necessity and brutally painful combination. It’s unclear to me how you come out of this in tact— to abandon meaning, to abandon hope, but to cling to the possibility that, in the end, it exists.

Getting back to writing has been an intimidating task. There’s a saying, “sucking at something is the first step to being sort of good at something.” The fact is, this only holds true for your first go around. After that it’s more, “being worse at something is the first step to getting back to where you were at that thing, which is the first step to getting sort of good at it.”

I’ve experienced this with a number of things in my life- my recent foray into music in Nashville after a lengthy break, current attempts to get involved with music in New York City, and getting back to writing after such a length break. I see that returning to a skill is made particularly difficult due to a potent combination of:

Do you see the one thread tying all three of those reasons together? None of them actually prevent you from doing it. They’re all mental, all bullshit, all excuses. I can weave as many narratives around why the thing I want is hard and I can’t do it, but the only hard thing about the above is facing the fear. There is nothing to be lost in the writing, in the sharing, in the putting it out there. There is nothing hard in the doing. There is only difficulty in hurdling the fear, in discovering the other side to be experienced.

Memento Mori.

-Justin

We live in an age where, more than ever, people believe in the power of megaphones. “Get in front of the right people, yell loud enough, and it’ll happen.”

The thing about megaphones is that they’re inherently repulsive. They’re loud and obnoxious, sometimes pushing away the exact people you want to connect with.

What if, instead of screaming through our megaphones, we lower our voices? What if we speak gently, as to say “Come listen if you want. I’m not going to force anything on you. I only seek to connect meaningfully, with your permission, and oh, I also know how to listen back.”

In a world of repulsion, there’s power in the silent pull.