If you write for a living, your work becomes much easier when you see that most people are standing knee-deep in swamp of emotions. The swamp is murky, it clouds their judgement and each spot of dust and weeds is another emotion or experience in their life that hasn’t been expressed.
Most people stay in their swamp all their life – and when they do take a cautious step to escape it, the mud drags them down again by their feet. To them, escaping from the swamp feels impossible.
They don’t seem to realise that they could just wade to the sides, clean their feet and climb ashore. Instead, they stay put. They watch as the water from a nearby lake periodically floods and washes fresh dirt into the swamp – and as they age, the swamp becomes higher until they are too frail to escape it.
You see, most people haven’t learnt how to drain a swamp – or if, draining it seems impossible, at least to find a safe way out.
They might stamp on the plants in the swamp, trying desperately to keep them below the surface. They prefer to suppress their emotions instead of risking that others might see them.
Or they plant beautiful flowers to hide the swamp and keep it hidden from afar – pointing instead at the swamps of the people around them. They choose to – consciously or unconsciously – project their emotions on others.
All when they could instead turn the swamp into a beautiful field. They could transform their emotions and express them on a higher energetic frequency.
But as they prefer to stay in the swamp – whole industries have developed around swamp management and beautification. There are competitions around whose swamp looks best, whose swamp holds the most water and resources, and who should be crowned “Swamp master of the year”.
Businesses are making fortunes selling pruners, rakes and shovels – and a whole host of swamp cleaning tools. There are also companies that teach people how to drain their swamps – but those are few and far between.
You might be surprised to hear this – but for most people is easier, and more convenient to improve their swamp periodically than it is to leave it.
You see, they are so used to talking about their swamp, they would prefer to keep that conversation going instead of risking what they know for the land of opportunities outside.
So, before you write– see if you’ve got people who wants to stay in their wet, seemingly comfortable swamp or if your readers are leaving (or have left it) already.
If readers want to stay in the swamp, all you can offer are tools to make their swamp more pleasant. Maybe you choose to entertain and distract them with music, games, and other spectacles, or offer tools and resources that they need to sustain the ‘swamp life’ (like pruners, rakes, and shovels).
In those lines of business, the best you can do is to empathise with their existence – and nurture the hope that they might one day leave the swamp to explore the unchartered land around them.
But 80% or more choose to stay in the swamp – even when they have all they need to leave it. For those 20% – those who see in their mind today the exit path for tomorrow – and of course those who have already left, you can speak more clearly about what you can knowledge and experiences you can share with them.
These 20% will be happy to learn about the trails you have already walked, and the mindset you used to climb across fallen tree branches and broken logs, and fend off wild boars, and swamp animals.
While they know full well that your experience won’t be the same as theirs, they are happy to soak up your stories and use them as guide on their way forward. An honest letter about your vision and how they can blaze their own trail – with you as a pit stop along the way – will work wonders in jointly moving forward.
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