The Desire to be Heard

I have been at this for ten years now. 2,300 times I have typed out my thoughts and published them in this space. The Tempest has served as a platform to share my thoughts and opinions with anyone willing to read them. It has been part creative outlet, part opinion column and part confessional. It has also been a sometimes unfortunate public record of the many occasions where I have been wrong about things, sometimes spectacularly. Prior to The Tempest I produced 14 leather bound journals, 19 years of such thoughts which were private, for my own consumption. I’m not sure what to make of it all, what it says about me that I feel compelled to write things down. Part of it is my belief that history is important, the proper understanding of which can be the world’s best teacher. Part of it is the notion that when I am gone perhaps my children and grandchildren will find my recollections instructive, or at the least interesting. I wonder what Dad thought about Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, gay marriage, the designated hitter rule? It’s all in there. Did Pops ever doubt himself? Was he ever afraid? Yes and yes. You can look it up.

But the real reason for The Tempest has become clear to me recently. Human beings all come with various desires baked in to their DNA, a survival instinct, sexual attraction, flight or fight etc. One of the strongest instinctive desires is often overlooked, the the desire to be heard. Look around  and you will see this desire being played out all around you, the quest to be heard and understood. I recognize it in every street protest, every Facebook argument, every long line at the voting booth. I even see it in places of great violence, where all self discipline has been lost. Riots are at their essence a misshapen scream to be heard gone horribly wrong, producing the polar opposite effect in the listener. All we see is the destruction, everything else gets downed out.

I see this desire to be heard and understood in every single divorce I have ever encountered. Although there may have been other reasons, practically every person I have ever talked to about their divorce says something like... He just never listened to me. She never heard me, never tried to understand.

So, I continue to write. For me it’s always been great fun, almost a habit, but always therapeutic. The best part about a blog is that nobody is forced to indulge me. If you aren’t interested in what I have to say, you are free to ignore the post. Also, if you disagree with what I write you are free to register your disagreement in the Comments section. That way, you get to be heard too. The popularity of The Tempest has waxed and waned over the past ten years. There have been times when everything I have posted gets devoured by lots of people, but then there are also times when most of what I write gets totally ignored. You can’t take it personally and I never do. It’s an odd fact that after ten years I still can’t predict with any reliable accuracy which it will be...which is just as well since writing to maximize clicks would be the death knell of this blog. The rule here has always been that I write about things I care about, never what I think the reader might care about. Hence, all my baseball rants.

But, to all of you who have taken the time to read for the past ten years, especially you devoted few who read everything, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.