Daniel Beaty - Transforming Pain to Power: Unlock Your Unlimited Potential

by Michael Eric Dyson

T oo many of us go a lifetime without coming to a critical insight: The painful experiences we endure can launch us to incredible futures. Sure, it sounds like one of the um family: pablum, perhaps hokum, maybe even a nostrum. But the hard, cold fact is that those folk who find the power to dig through the hurtful nos in their lives can find their way to a resounding yes. That sounds like more self-help mumbo-jumbo still, but the truth is that we all need help, and the self is as good a place to start as any other; indeed, before any other.

Lets be honest: Too many of us havent given ourselvesour selvespermission to heal. We barricade ourselves behind this theory or that fantasy of abstract, impersonal history and fail to grasp our role in making sure that we make it to wholeness. That scares some of us because we believe that it denies the vicious roll of blind social forces that target some folks and communities with unrelenting intensity. Not so!

Theres no denying that no matter what you do with yourselfyour selfthat there are bigger factors at play that can set you on course, or knock you off-kilter, in the blink of an eye. The broader world can ever bring menace and misery to your door, true. But many of the people whove fought back against these larger forces, folks whove identified the social pathologies at the root of personal suffering, have at least acknowledged that we can take actions to make sure that things turn out better than they might if we just accept things, and ourselvesour selvesas we are.

As we fight against injustice, as we speak back to pain, as we argue with merchants of unnecessary grief, we must always, at the same time, fix up, as best we can, with what we have at hand and heart, the selves that will occupy the just society for which we struggle. The beauty of social justice is that it brings into sharper focus the care for self that is far more than either brutal narcissism or extravagant selfishness. We learn to embrace a better self as we struggle for a better world.

The great thing about our greatest artists and thinkers is that they help us put on bifocals to focus on the larger landscape of the social order and the intimate space of ourselvesour selves. When we listen to songs, read books, attend plays, see visual art and move to the rhythms of dance, we enlarge our understanding of the world around us, and the world teeming inside us. We learn many lessons from our artists, none more important than that the pain that dogs us can be put to great use if we can find a way to love ourselvesour selvesand beat back the forces that threaten to drag us down from outside or within.

Thank God for Daniel Beaty. He is a gifted and brave soul who is willing to share with you what hes learned from struggling against ugly odds to craft a life of fierce loyalty to truth while standing strong in the midst of heartbreak and humiliation. Long ago, like the legendary former UN Secretary-General Dag Harmmarskjld, he said yes to his destiny and no to the forces that would take him down. The book you hold in your hand is an honest and searing road map to one mans wisdom of survival, and if you follow it, you might find that it helps you do the same thing. You cant ask much more of a book, and this book delivers with clarity, poetry, and power. Take it in daily doses. Use it at the risk of your improvement. Recognize that its side effects are deepened understanding and broad growth. And realize that before you know it, as you read about his transforming pain to power, you might do the same. Theres nothing better that Beaty or any of us who admire his work could ever hope for.