Grade 9

As I left the room, I felt the urgent sense that I had to do something. I didn’t know quite what it was that I wanted to achieve, but there was something telling me I had to express something. It took me a while to realise that just like many of my peers, I was feeling inspired. That the artists, authors and journalists who came to speak to Grade 9 during Writers Fortnight were inspiring. Not in that cheesy, cliched “if life gives you lemons, make lemonade” way, but in the “I need to do something special. Right now.” way.

What is inspiration, really?

To inspire is to fill someone with an urge to do or express something, so strong that they cannot sit back and deny it. Inspiration is essential in allowing us to act on what we are passionate about, and to explore how we can become better people.

Often we hear of inspirational speakers who have suffered through a traumatic incident or overcome obstacles. How do we inspire people if we don’t have a hero story?

Inspiration is spontaneous

I don’t think real inspiration has to come from a heroic story. In my experience, inspiration takes you by surprise. I have found inspiration in the smallest of things – an attitude, an ant, or a style of writing. I have found that while we see inspiration as coming from a hero, people who are truly inspired have been affected by feelings and actions that are honest and raw.

Danny Raven Tan, an artist and survivor of pancreatic cancer, whose father passed away shortly after his mum was diagnosed with dementia, is an example. I came into his Writers Fortnight talk expecting to hear an interesting story, and left ready to paint the world away. He wasn’t trying to inspire us, but he left me ready to come roaring through life. When I later told him how inspirational his speech had been, he almost laughed it off “Since when did I become an “inspirational” speaker?! LOL. I was in your school to “share” my story. I was not there to deliberately inspire you guys.”

Before he said this, I had assumed it was his story that was so inspiring. Later, I realised that his unfiltered attitude and raw, unshameful honesty was what made his speech so stirring. Danny Raven Tan was an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances, and I was not inspired by what he went through, but by the way he went through it. He was a genuinely strong person, who didn’t believe in wallowing in self-pity, even under the hardest of circumstances.

The harder you try, the harder it gets

The same applied to the other Writers Fortnight speakers. I found the stories of the unintentionally inspiring speakers the most exciting. To them, they were just going about their lives. Marc Nair, who’s slightly satirical poems drew you in with their humour and left you feeling passionate about issues you had no idea you were passionate about. And Steve Dawson, a journalist who risked his job as an accountant to do what he loved. They understood that they were teaching us important things, but they did not realise that we were leaving ready to change, ready to be like them. Had they come into the room telling us how inspiring they were, “listen to me, I’m special, you can be like me,” many students would have shut down, not willing to listen to a speech they assumed would make them feel guilty for not having an interesting enough life.

The Writers Fortnight speakers such as Danny Raven Tan and SteveDawson didn’t look like they had come to inspire us either. They didn’t have a name tag that described them as an “inspirational speaker” or a special sticker or badge. It often seems as if inspiration comes in disguise – you don’t see something as “inspirational” until it jumps out at you.

I realised that there aren’t rules about who or what is inspiring. What you find inspiring could be entirely different from someone else’s idea of inspiration. There aren’t specific criteria you have to fit to be an inspirational speaker, and there is no way of telling whether someone is special at first glance. For all you know, the kid sitting next to you in English could grow up to inspire hundreds of people.

Maybe we should all just continue to go about our lives, doing what is right for us and acting for change on what we are passionate about. Just as inspiration will come to us when we need it, we will inspire others by our actions and attitudes. Actively seeking to inspire will leave our stories hollow, built solely around the fact that we are desperate to simply be “an inspiration.”

After all, real inspiration always seems to be accidental.

Web Page