This series brings to you the most thought-provoking excerpts from my chat sessions with visionary personalities, as recorded for the Slingshot Living radio show. The conversations reveal valuable wisdom, playful anecdotes and useful advice on how to continuously overstep perceived boundaries for success in your business and your personal life.
Today’s segment features an excerpt from my inspirational chat with Rob Bell, spiritual pioneer and best-selling author.
Q. You explore the relationship between creativity and suffering, what are some of the highlights you can share with us?I invite you to listen to the entire chat with Rob Bell and my co-host, Jesse Dylan, here.
A. When you're in the midst of a community like I've been you encounter all kinds of suffering. But then what you also do is you see the people six months later, a year later, 18 months later, three years after the cancer diagnosis. What I kept discovering is that people who I had seen go through unspeakable tragic suffering time and time again I would see over the course of time how it actually shaped them in all these really beautiful ways. So there's this businessman who is obsessed with his work—he works all the time. He gets a cancer diagnosis. The doctor says rest and he ends up reconnecting with his family and finding a whole new life of pleasure and enjoyment that he was missing out on. We don't want to suffer, we wouldn't wish suffering on our worst enemy, we don't want a cancer diagnosis, or a boyfriend or girlfriend to get hit by a car and yet when you ask people to name the most significant moments in their life people often name really difficult horrible things. The suffering turned out to have all of this fresh creative potential within it. Especially as Americans, we don't know what to do with suffering. It doesn't fit the picture we were painted that if you do all the right things you'll have a happy, nice life. And yet there is suffering all around us. And so my hope is just to give people new ways to think about this.
