Maya Angelou, who died this week at the age of 86, was a woman who understood a great many things. She understood what it was to be the victim of violence, racism, and discrimination. She understood what it was to scrape for survival. She understood the fear–and the freedom–of starting out alone on unknown, uncharted paths. She understood the double-edged sword of love and loss, and the immutable laws of life’s costs and trade-offs. The one time I heard her speak in person, she was 72 years old and walking with a cane due to a hip injury. She apologized for her slow gait, noting, wryly, that “old age is not for sissies.”
But Maya Angelou also understood something essential to any person wishing to know the joy of a passion-guided journey or life path: the power and importance of voice. Not just words, although she was a master of those, as well. But voice itself; the outward expression of each person’s inner and most authentic truths, beliefs, knowledge, passions, dreams, desires, and self.
When Angelou was 7 or 8 years old, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. Unlike many young girls who are sexually assaulted, she found the courage to speak up about it and testified against the man in court. After he was convicted, he was beaten to death by a mob outraged by the attack. Horrified that her words had led to a man’s death, Angelou literally did not speak for five years after the trial. But she eventually came to terms with the potential consequences of speaking out, and she came to embrace the power of her own, unique, and multifaceted voice.
Why does that matter? Because you can’t find your passion, or passions, without first finding that voice. It’s what tells you that this, and not that, is what’s really you; what you care about most, fear most, wish for most, and feel authentic passion for pursuing, even if the road leading there is long, rough, and lonely. And passion is the fire that fuels the conviction and endurance that turns the seemingly impossible into something both possible and real.
The reason Maya Angelou was able to be such a force in the world; indeed, the reason she was able to change not just her life, but in some small ways, the world itself: how it viewed African-American women, how individual women viewed themselves, and how readers of her work then looked at the many shades of beauty, joy and sorrow in the world–not to mention the impact she had as a performer, singer, teacher and advocate of civil rights–was because of how well she understood, lived, sang with and followed her own true voice.
In an appreciation of Angelou, published in the New York Times on Thursday, poet Elizabeth Alexander quoted a sentiment she’d often heard attributed to Angelou: “If you have a song to sing, who are you not to open your mouth and sing to the world?” Angelou, she said, believed that “singing your song … should be as natural as breathing, even if, as she did, you struggled to come to voice.”
It sounds so simple. And yet, it’s something few people actually manage to do. However …those “few people” include the best “missionary” entrepreneurs, the most powerful agents of change, and the strongest leaders and explorers. Show me a person following a passionate path in life; a person who possesses an enviable courage in following an uncharted path; someone whose convictions ring so powerful, and so true, that they’re compelling even as a voice of one, and I will show you someone who has found their most authentic inner voice, and is both following it and singing out loud with it in the world.
We forget that sometimes. We think we have to be persuasive in in terms calculated to appeal to a particular audience to achieve “success.” Or we waste time and energy calculating our actions in terms of how others will see us, instead of what our inner voices care about most. But Maya Angelou was a reminder of the power of simply being yourself. Of speaking from the heart, without fear, of what lives there … and speaking, dancing, singing, living, and working on those things with the passion that can only be sparked by those deep and truest dreams, hopes, sorrows, fears and joys.
Maya Angelou was a phenomenal woman, to be sure. But she also showed, by example, the phenomenal power, joy, and life each of us can have if we can but find our true voices, and find the courage to sing out loud with them in our lives, and in the world.
More on this subject to follow … soon!
