David Whyte's Pathless Path | #233

July 28, 2023: Greetings from Connecticut! We just spent a few days in NYC and got to meet a number of you in New York! I’m hoping to do more in-person meetups over the coming year, so stay tuned.

+ I published two podcast episodes this week.

• Jenny Blake: On her journey leaving Google, writing three books (including self-publishing her last one), learning to follow her intuition, and how her work has changed over time. Listen here.

• Angie & I: we reflect on 4.5 months into our parenting journey and do the “time bucket” exercise from Bill Perkin’s book Die With Zero. You can watch the episode here or listen in your ears here.

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#1 David Whyte’s Pathless Path

I’ve been meaning to do a post about David Whyte’s Crossing The Unknown Sea for a while and couldn’t quite figure out how to write something that would do it justice. So I decided to take the quotes that resonated most with me and organize them by themes. The thing I loved about this book was that it brought alive many of the common phases I’ve seen people go through on their own pathless paths but with a lot more poetic flair.

The book is probably my favorite of Whyte’s. It explores his own personal journey shifting from being a naturalist in the Galapagos to working in a non-profit to quitting without much of a plan to become a poet in his 30s.

Here are 11 themes that resonated with me:

#1 Work Can Provide Safety

• "If I can reduce my image of work to just a job I have to do, then I keep myself safely away from the losses to be endured in putting my heart's desires at stake."

• "Work provides safety. To define work in other ways than safety is to risk our illusions of immunity in the one organized area of life where we seem to keep nature and the world at bay."

#2 On “Good Work”

• "Good work is work that makes sense, and that grants sense and meaning to the one who is doing it and to those affected by it."

• "Finding a work to which we can dedicate ourselves always calls for some kind of courage, some form of heartfelt participation."

• "Work that matters is work that is challenging and enlarging and that seems to be doing something for others."

• To see life and work as a pilgrimage is not a strategy for increased production (though by understanding the wellsprings of human creativity, there is every chance it might happen); it does not mean that we can careers in precise stages, clearly and concisely, as to when, where and how everything should happen. All of our great artistic and religious traditions take equally great pains to inform us that we must never mistake a good career for good work. Life is a creative, intimate, and unpredictable conversation if it is nothing else, spoken or unspoken, and our life and our work are both the result of the particular way we hold that passionate conversation.”

#3 How Work Nudges Us To Avoid The Call

• "We have unconsciously created a work world so secondary, so complex, and so busy and bullied by surface forces that embroiled in those surface difficulties, we have the perfect busy excuse not to wrestle with more essential difficulties of existence, the difficulties of finding a work and a life suited to our individual natures."

• "A work emboldens us for a while, and then, if we do not invigorate and reimagine our participation, it begins to enclose us and slowly starve our spirit."

• “Every path no matter how diligently we follow it can lead to staleness and ennui. We might reach dizzying heights in our organization, occupy the top floor of any given building, or, as zoologist, make it to the Galapagos islands, but if we lose our horizon and the excitement of that horizon, our high office or our stories islands can seem like a gilded cage.

• “Every person comes to a place, at one time or another in their maturation, of complete loss and deadness, a stark and frightening absence of creativity and enthusiasm where life seems to retreat away from us like a tide. Our desperate grasping after the outgoing energy only marks our desperation more fully. The old magic seems to be ours no longer, and we look enviously at those still able to create it. This is the very point where deep physical memories are our lifeline to any future we want for ourselves, In effect, somewhere inside us, the child is still running enthusiastically toward a horizon it once glimpsed. Our future depends on finding this original directional movement in our lives, no matter how far we feel we are into middle age. It calls for a reinvestigation of the way we physically inhabit the world.”

• “Why are the stakes so high in our work? Why do we work long hours, ignore our children, neglect our spouse, spend enormous amounts of time away from home, and, at our worst, stoop to theft, bribery, threats, and bullying to get things done? Somewhere in the midst of work is a hidden trove of imaginative treasure that we hope can give us self-respect, independence, and the ease we desire. But to grasp any of these qualities is to attempt to touch the essence of freedom, and freedom can rarely be obtained by using methods and bully-boy tactics that imprison us by their very use. The outlaw is the radical, the one close to the roots of existence. The one who refuses to forget their humanity and in remembering, helps everyone else to remember, too.”

#4 There is More to the World

• “Young as I was in Galapagos, I began to touch an exposed nerve in human experience; the sense that there is something larger in the world than mere human priorities. Whatever work I was doing, something larger, more frightening, with a different order of priorities was moving in parallel. Something that encompassed a grander and more difficult universe than my career goals.”

• “Whenever we leave the familiar behind, we become in a certain way, childlike again. In our vulnerability, we look for the grown-up equivalent of parental help, but we are also thrown back upon those images and inner resources that are the province of a dreaming youngster...The single most useful power inside us at these critical times is the expressive imagination, that part of us that dreams and creates images representative of both our deepest desires and the way we feel we are made for a continuing work in the world.”

#5 On Being Lost & Midlife

• “The interesting thing about the crisis we often associate with middle age is that it is not confined to our lives after forty-five. A lost teenager can exhibit the same sense of drift, the same dark depression, and the same feeling of being walled off behind glass as any graying fifty-year-old. Just like the body of a man or woman encountering middle age, the teenager's new body can also seem a new and uncontrollable force. Middle age is a cyclical visitation throughout our existence. We can experience an early middle-age crisis when we are in the midst of a project that needs desperately to be redefined or redrawn, or we can find middle age when we are only three months into a marriage, as trapped and desperate as if we had been there for thirty years. We can find it staring out of a palatial hotel room when we don't know why we are there or why the company is paying the outrageous bill. Any experience where the tide seems to have left us stranded is a good equivalent. The essence of midlife crisis is that something has to change but the person feels he no longer has the body, the will, or the energy to do it anymore. We look desperately for other bodies. Literally or figuratively.”

#6 Refusal Of The Call

• “Poetry tugged and beckoned to me to move in its direction, but I hadn't the faith for the final step of making myself visible. How was I to make a living from it, for God's sake? The question seemed to stop everything in its tracks. I kept moving ignoring the whispered invitation.”

• “There is a deeper, older human intuition at play that knows any real step forward comes through our pains and vulnerabilities, which is the reason we began to busy ourselves in the first place so that we could stay well away from them. If we stopped, we would have to sojourn in areas that have nothing to do with getting things done but everything to do with being done to ourselves.”

#7 Following What Matters & Taking Action

• "To have a desire in life literally means to keep your star in sight, to follow a glimmer, a beacon, a disappearing will o the wisp over the horizon into someplace you cannot yet fully imagine.”

• “I decided on two things: firstly, I was going to do at least one thing every day toward my future life as a poet. I calculated that no matter how small a step I took each day, over a year that would come to a grand total of 365 actions toward the life I wanted. One thing a day adds up to a great deal over time. One thing a day is a powerful multiplier. Sometimes that one thing was writing poetry itself or memorizing lines of a newly read poem that caught my eye, or just writing a letter to an organization to say I was available for readings or talks. Sometimes it was a phone call to someone in a position of influence, letting them know what I could do. Some. times it was preparing the ground in my mind before the conversation. Soon I felt as if I was being prepared by the conversations themselves. Over the ensuing weeks, it was beginning to add up. I began to overhear a background buzz in the ethers that added to my dedication.”

• “We must be careful what we ask for in our work, I told myself, we may get it, and most likely we will not be prepared for it when it arrives.”

#8 Stepping Into The Unknown

• “I had an intuition that when you really annunciate what you want in the world you will always be greeted, in the first place, with some species of silence. It may be that the silence is there so that you can hear exactly what you have asked for, and hear it more clearly so that you can get it right. If the goal is real and intensely personal, as it should be, others naturally should not be able to understand it the first time it finds its own voice. It means in a way, in a very difficult way, that you are on to something. Though daunting, at the beginning, silence is good, and silence is a testing fire. There are many kinds of silence to encounter in life, but there is a particular and delicious terror to the anticipatory silence that we create from actually following our heart's desires.”

• “The crucial point about our arrival in a new territory is that it is often a time of disorientation and disappearance. We look for cover as an antidote to our disorientation and disappear into the glory of our past story in the process. Our disappearance occurs at a crucial time, exactly the time when we are forming the habits and outlook that will serve us for the next stage of the journey.”

#9 Dealing With Pressure From Others + The Outside World

• “One of the distinguishing features of any courageous human being is the ability to remain unutterably themselves in the midst of conforming pressures. The surprising realization is that our friends can try to make us conform as much as our worst enemies. The excuses to fall away, to lose courage, to be other than ourselves are ever present and incredibly intimate. There seems to be no profession exempt from these warping forces, whether we are dry-walling or day trading or doctoring.”

• “At the beginning you neat verve and nerve and reserves of vitality to embark on any new path, especially to overcome any skepticism that has lodged in your own body from the outside world's refusal to believe in you. As the time for the talk grew nearer there were moments when I could have wept with frustration. For years my whole life had been leading up to just such an audience and I simply couldn't believe that I seemed in no fit condition for the encounter.”

• “To live with courage in any work or in any organization, we must know intimately the part of us that does not give a damn about the organization or the work. That knows how to live outside the law as well as within it. We do this not to create a veneer of protection through cynicism, but so that we can meet the powerful structures that inform our existence on equal terms, and in a real conversation of equals.”

#10 On Arrival

• So much of our work and our ideas of work are bent toward arrival in the promised land. We might be on a pilgrimage of identity in work, but it is almost always the prospect of arrival that keeps us going rather than the journey itself. We aim for a certain genius in our daily work which most always eludes us, but still, it is the possibility of genius that has us toiling late into the night. We aim for a marriage, a partner, a house, or a garden, and work and sacrifice for that future vision of loveliness, until sometimes the very nature of our struggle disqualifies us from the garden we have so long desired. But arrival has its own difficulties. We may imagine a place in the hierarchy of our organization where we will find safety and security, from which we will then speak out, but find ourselves just as unsure even as we pace the supposedly safe upper floor of the building. We promise to be generous with our money but die with our retirement account stuffed with ungiven treasure. We long for an audience, to be the center of attention, to have our thoughts heard in the world, and find ourselves, once it is assembled before us, terrified by the prospect. The actual arrival at a goal always creates a turmoil unconnected to any previous imaginings. Once we cross the frontier from desire to actual fulfillment, we find that in order to inhabit the new world we have to slough off the identity that was so necessary to us as a seeker. At this point we may have become, over the years, so much the seeker that we cannot put that ever-moving, never-stopping, always-searching identity down in order to pick up anything new. We find the image of the seeker has become our ultimate defense against the intimacy of any new arrival. The promised land we thought we wanted suddenly seems to ask for a simplification of our character that seems too much too soon. Almost by definition, any real arrival always seems to occur too soon.

#11 On The Cycles of Life

• Human beings left to their own devices a very rare event-seem to work according to the quality of a given season and learn similarly in cycles. Good work and good education are achieved by visitation and then absence, appearance and disappearance. Most people who exhibit a mastery in a work or a subject have often left it completely for a long period in their lives only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the arrival of any new season, no birdsong at the start of its day. Constant learning is counterproductive and makes both ourselves and the subject stale and uninteresting.”

+If you liked these quotes, you might the thread I did on the twelve phases on the pathless path (partially inspired by this book)

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Thanks For Reading!

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