The Secrets We Keep
Frank Warren keeps secrets. Actually, he doesn’t keep them, he posts them. Frank created and runs the website Postsecret.com where people anonymously send him a secret about themselves they haven’t told anyone.
In this TEDTalk, Frank shares some of those secrets and talks a bit about how the sharing of secrets has rippled out in interesting, unpredictable, and often wonderful ways.
We all have secrets, some that perhaps we’ll never share. And that’s important to remember. I suspect that we we think of any given person, we tend to think that the person we see – at work, or school, or church…or even at home – is the whole person. But they are not. We are not. We are complex human beings with a variety of dreams and hopes and hurts, and if we assume that what we see on the surface is all there is, we miss out on the complexity and beauty each human being represents.
The secrets Frank collects and posts reminds us, as he says, “of the countless human dramas, of frailty and heroism playing out silently in the lives of people all around us.” Can we, I wonder, take the time to get to know each other better? That sounds like a small thing, but when we’re constantly on the run – either literally getting to and from work, or running the kids from one activity to another, or figuratively in the pressure to always answer that next email or text – it’s hard to slow down, to listen, and to really get to know the people around us.
After watching Frank’s talk and spending some time on his site, I think it’s worth a try.
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