Blogging Insights 43 # Inspiring Others

My husband feels I inspire people. I do not inspire him because he argues about everything. It’s a husband-wife thing. If someone tells him the exact same thing, he’ll repeat it to me as if I’d never heard it before. He doesn’t listen to me. He say he does listen, but he confuses silence with listening. He is often silent and he is listening. To something on television or reading something online. I call that being ignored. He calls it being attentive.

I have to assume that somewhere in the course of writing 11,000 posts, give or take a thousand or two, I must have inspired someone. I think I inspired a couple of people to invest in a good camera and become better photographers. I have encouraged people which could be a kind of inspiration. I’m not sure about the “inspire” part. I think I am more an encourager than an inspirer.

Photo: Garry Armstrong – Built in 1882, a perfect place for inspiration!

There’s a reason for that. I don’t like making suggestions to people who haven’t thought of the idea on their own. I occasionally try to insert an idea by describing something which happened to me and I hope they pick up the concept. To outrightly suggest something that comes entirely from my head and not theirs? A lot of people resent that and probably with good reason. Many of us have been treated with little respect over the years, so we get prickly when we think it’s happening again.

I draw the line at grammar and punctuation. I can live with typos, but incorrectly used words and a failure to make even an attempt at punctuation makes the grammarian in me feisty.

Oddly, I’m pretty good at taking advice, I may want to think about the advice for a while — not necessarily a long while — before I do something about it. But if someone offers an idea that sounds better than whatever I’ve come up with, I’m ready to give it a try. Some of my best life decisions were made because someone suggested something. And the other best decisions were made by completely ignoring everyone’s suggestions and doing it my way. We are imperfect and so are our choices.

Sometimes, suggestions make assumptions about your life — like your available money, location, physical abilities, and so on — that make suggestions impossible, at least for me. It’s not they are out to get me. It’s just they aren’t me and lack all the information.

Inspired. I have nearly a million views on this blog. I’d like to think I’ve inspired someone. I hope so. That’s the reason I do this. I hope somewhere in the morass of words, concepts, and throes of anecdotal material, someone will have a flash. An idea will be born and an actual epiphany will spring forth.

Does changing someone’s mind count as inspiration?

Categories: #Blogging, #Photography, Humor

Tags: #blogginginsights, Blogging Insights #43, INSPIRATION, Marilyn Armstrong