I like David Whyte’s writing. He explores the fundamental feelings we regularly experience but often take for granted, providing a space for us to reflect on them.
Excerpts:
The measure of our courage is the measure of our willingness to embrace disappointment, to turn towards it rather than away; the understanding that every real conversation of life involves having our hearts broken somewhere along the way and that there is no sincere path we can follow where we will not be fully and immeasurably let down and brought to earth, where what initially looks like a betrayal eventually puts real ground under our feet.
Disappointment is a friend to transformation, a call to both accuracy and generosity in the assessment of our self and others, a test of sincerity and a catalyst of resilience. Disappointment is just the initial meeting with the frontier of an evolving life, an invitation to reality, which we expected to be one particular way and turns out to be another, often something difficult, more overwhelming and strangely, in the end, more rewarding.
In the course of the years, a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves; to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties, and even their sins, and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creating edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.
Giving is not done easily; giving is difficult. Giving well is, in fact, a discipline that must be practised and observed over years to be done properly. The apprenticeship to the art often involves giving the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time, and learning how to do the opposite through time and trial; it means getting beyond the boundaries of our own needs; it means understanding another and another’s life. Most importantly, it acknowledges implicitly that we ourselves must be recipients of things we cannot often identify or even find ourselves.
Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity; in a love relationship, in a life’s work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better, more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection, and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete’s quick but abstract ability to let go. Heartbreak has its own way of inhabiting time, and its own beautiful and trying patience in coming and going.
…heartbreak is as inescapable and inevitable as breathing, a part and a parcel of every path, asking for its due in every sincere course an individual takes. It may be that there may be not only no real life without the raw revelation of heartbreak but no single path we can take within a life that will allow us to escape without having that imaginative organ we call the heart broken by what it holds and then has to let go.
Loneliness is the place from which we pay real attention to voices other than our own; being alone allows us to find the healing power in the other. The shortest line in the briefest e-mail can heal, embolden, welcome home and enliven the most isolated identity. Lonely human are lonely because they are made to belong. Loneliness is a single malt taste of the very essentiality that makes conscious belonging possible. The doorway is closer than we think. I am alone; therefore, I belong.
Sincere regret may, in fact, be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, for experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own. To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life. Fully experience, regret turns our eyes, attentive and alert, to a future possibly lived better than our past.
Unconditional love is not fully possible, unconditional love is the necessary dream-like destination where we never fully arrive. We are mortal creatures of living and dying, and how we love and what we love is conditional upon where we stand in the drama and the seasonality of our living and dying. Love may be sanctified and ennobled by its commitment to the unconditional horizon of perfection, but what makes love real in the human world seems to be our moving, struggling conversation with that wanted horizon rather than any possibility of arrival. The hope for, or the declaration of, a purely spiritual, unconditional love is more often a coded desire for immunity and safety, an attempt to forgo the trials of vulnerability, powerlessness and the exquisite pain to which we appreciate ourselves in a relationship, a marriage, in raising children, in a work we love and desire.
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