On the Road with Jack Kerouac

Wednesday marked Jack Kerouac’s birthday.  The prolific American novelist would have been 92 this week.

An astute observer pointed out to me that this storytelling image, featured multiple places on my website, contains an excerpt from Kerouac’s novel, On the Road.  Impressive observation.

As that recognition converged with the celebration of his birthday, I found myself reading an article about his life.  This piece of his advice emerged as practical to writing and relationships:

“Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.”  —Heaven and Other Poems

My interpretation of it?  Our end goal in written and verbal recitation is for the emergent offering to resemble the inner dialogue as closely as possible.

Isn’t his advice, then, referencing authenticity?

How often our humanity trips us up in pursuit of internal and external conformity.

What accounts for the breakdown?  Emotion.  Strong emotion can block our ability to communicate with clarity.  Our understanding of the emotional self predicts how well our intended meaning is translated to the audience–person or page.

There are times when the strength of that emotion creates clarity rather than diminishing it.  But for those of us who can be emotionally obtuse, it muddies the waters.

Psychiatrist Dan Siegel says “Emotions can thus be seen as an integrating process that links the internal and interpersonal worlds of the human mind” (The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are).

Whether or not those emotions accurately link the internal  to the interpersonal depends on our awareness of emotional motivations. Considering those motivations before writing or conversing has several advantages:

  • inclusion of logic/reason
  • perspective
  • attunement to the audience
  • adherence to an agenda

So how do you do that?  Simply reflect on what you want to say, before the conversation, with the audience and agenda in mind.  Write it down, or mull it over, and that space will diminish some emotional reactivity, and allow for perspective.  After perspective develops, clarity can emerge.

Try it out.  Notice if there’s a burgeoning alignment between thought and speech afterwards.  Does the audience get the intended meaning?

If so, in the spirit of Jack Kerouac, you could take up writing.  And as internal dialogue meets external prose, you’ll be one step closer to authenticity.