Orient Yourself

Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. David Whyte, Sweet Darkness Stones Across the River In October 2016, I published my first book, Stones Across the River. The book is a curated and edited collection of my early blog posts centered on the metaphor of life as a process of finding our way across the raging rivers of challenge, one stone at a time. Sometimes we see the next stone promising safe passage, and sometimes we have to make a leap of faith. The book itself was part of those first faltering steps of someone trying to share the discoveries of failure and opportunity even while navigating the stones hidden in his own raging rivers. Six months before, I launched my website at phillipberry.com with the title Orient Yourself serving as the call to action and the tagline. At the time and on many occasions since, I’ve asked myself “why?” There was no commercial purpose or aspiration. These posts have nothing to do with the business of pharmaceuticals or healthcare and there was never any goal of being a best seller or international speaker. The world has plenty of those and I am quite fortunate to not have to rely on my words to support my family. Follow the Signs Like much of what I pursue, the blog, the website, the books, and our business ventures, have all stemmed from “follow the signs” moments. Those tugs, nudges, small voices, dead ends, and open windows, that appear along our path serving to move us in one direction or another. Some of us require more nudging than others and we ignore the signs at our peril. Often, the “right” pathways open in a series of “serendipitous” moments and their rightness is generally only seen later as we look in the rearview mirror. I’ve learned to see purpose in most of what is happening in my life…and the lives of those around me. Rarely does an “accident” not lead somewhere surprising and ultimately, “right.” The words written today in whatever structure or vision often land on others in unexpected ways, times, and interpretations. Often, particularly in the beginning, the “why” of the call is not nearly as important as obedience to the call. The website and my writing have always been about collecting observations that might help others thrive – that the words might land where they need to at the right time. In this sense, I have always written to myself first and trusted that they will go somewhere, or nowhere, as needed. If they are not helping someone else see or live or love more fully, then they are too small. Point of View Lately, I have been fascinated withe notion of “point of view.” Our perspective colors everything we see in known and unknown ways. As a society, we like to criticize “bias” as dark, nefarious thing but we can approach nothing without it as it reflects our vantage point, the collection of experiences, knowledge, wisdom, and desires that frame our underlying approach to the world around us. Our point of view is the filter through which we see and receive the world, When we launched phillipberry.com, we felt that it needed a theme to help identify its center and purpose. As I meandered through a description of why I wanted a website or to write a blog, our designer threw out the “Orient Yourself” concept and I loved it immediately. My original hope was that I would be the one helpi