Speak Your Truth - Even When Nobody Listens

I just saw the most amazing film called Searching for Sugar Man.

It's an unbelievable true story about a guy named Sixto Rodriguez who recorded a few albums in the late 1960's and early 1970's that were a total flop - at least here in the US.

But unbeknownst to him some bootleg copies somehow made it into South Africa during the heart of the oppressive Apartheid period, where his music became not only popular, but absolutely iconic.

But get this... somewhere between the censorship of a closed Apartheid society and the corruption of the music industry, word of his fame (not to mention the monetary rewards that should have gone with it) never made it back to Rodriguez.

He had NO IDEA that people halfway across the world were listening to his music, and because of some strange rumor, everybody in South Africa thought that he was dead.

Anyhow, this is the amazing story of how these guys in South Africa set out to find out what happened to him, and ended up discovering the man himself... alive and well, and working as a manual laborer in Detroit!

So here he is some thirty years after the albums were released. His music career is all but forgotten, and these guys come along, pull him out of obscurity and take him to South Africa where he is hailed as a hero.

I'm struggling to find an adequate word to describe this story... "uplifting" doesn't seem to do it justice.

I mean here's this guy who buy all societal measures would have been called a failure. Yet half way across the world he's an icon, and a hero, and his music helped to spark a movement that overturned one of the most oppressive regimes in history.

What a story!

We live in this crazy world where everybody is so focused on "success" and "rewards" and "recognition" and "popularity" - but it's like we've forgotten that those things aren't really the goal at all, they're simply side effects that come from living a meaningful life... from putting yourself out there, being a person of integrity and speaking your truth to the world.

Or at least that's how it ought to be in my humble opinion. All too often these days it seems like people seek fame and stardom simply for the sake of fame and stardom. I can never figure out what the fascination is with these people who are famous simply for being famous.

Then when we do engage genuinely, and the recognition, or money or popularity doesn't come immediately, we tend to throw up our hands in frustration and give up. So here's the perfect story of why you shouldn't give up, and why you should keep making your proverbial music - even if you're not "successful" at all.

We just don't know how our actions are gonna affect other people in the big picture sense. Maybe our message just hasn't found the right audience, or the right time, or the right place, or the right whatever - but that doesn't mean we should stop delivering it. Because somewhere, sometime, somehow it could fall on fertile soil, and we may never even know it.

I keep thinking of the last verse of the Jackson Browne song For a Dancer.

Into a dancer you have grown
From a seed somebody else has thrown
Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own
And somewhere between the time you arrive
And the time you go 
May lie a reason you were alive 
But you'll never know

Go forth peoples! Speak your truth to the world, and never EVER let anybody convince you that what you have to offer isn't good enough, or important enough, or unique enough, or whatever enough to matter. Somehow, somewhere, sometime your voice will find its way to the people who need to hear it.