Working toward Wholeheartedness
I’m still processing and learning from poet David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, but I wanted to share a few moving passages with you:
Speed gets noticed. Speed is praised by others. Speed is self-important. Speed absolves us. Speed means we don’t really belong to any particular thing or person we are visiting and thus appears to elevate us above the ground of our labors. When it becomes all-consuming, speed is the ultimate defense, the antidote to stopping and really looking. If we really saw what we were doing and who we had become, we feel we might not survive the stopping and the accompanying self-appraisal. So we don’t stop, and the faster we go, the harder it becomes to stop. We keep moving on whenever any form of true commitment seems to surface. Speed is also a warning, a throbbing, insistent indicator that some cliff edge or other is very near, a sure diagnostic sign that we are living someone else’s life and doing someone else’s work. But speed saves us the pain of all that stopping; speed can be such a balm, a saving grace, a way we tell ourselves, in unconscious ways, that we are really not participating.
The great tragedy of speed as an answer to the complexities and responsibilities of existence is that very soon we cannot recognize anything or anyone who is not traveling at the same velocity as we are. We see only those moving in the same whirling orbit and only those moving with the same urgency. Soon we begin to suffer a form of amnesia, caused by the blurred vision of velocity itself, where those things germane to our humanity are dropped from our minds one by one. We start to lose sight of any colleagues who are moving at a slower pace, and we start to lose sight of the bigger, slower cycles that underlie our work. We especially lose sight of the big, unfolding wave form passing through our lives that is indicative of our central character. On the personal side, as slaves to speed, we start to lose sight of family members, especially children, or those who are ill or infirm, who are not flying through the world as quickly and determinedly as we are. Just as seriously, we begin to leave behind the parts of our own selves that limp a little, the vulnerabilities that actually give us color and character. We forget that our sanity is dependent on a relationship with longer, more patient cycles extending beyond the urgencies and madness of the office.
This rip-roaring speed of our work lives can lead us away from what matters and leave us exhausted. Whyte, in his own moment of professional burnout, had a wise friend suggest to him: “You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?.... The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness…. You are so tired through and through because a good half of what you do here in this organization has nothing to do with your true powers, or the place you have reached in your life. You are only half here, and half here will kill you after a while.”
I love this passage because there’s a sense of inevitability and accumulation that Whyte is able to convey through the passage about speed. And then he lands on, “half here will kill you after a while.”
Being only half here in our work lives means we become “strangers even to ourselves.” There’s an un-naturalness to this way of being. Whyte’s friend borrows an image of clumsiness from poet Rainer Maria Rilke who describes “the awkward way the swan walks”:
This clumsy living that moves lumbering
as if in ropes through what is not done,
reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.
And to die, which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.
—translated by Robert Bly
From the awkward way the swan walks, Rilke then shows how effortless the transformation can be when the swan settles on water. The pull of the waves is effortless and natural as the swan is “carried, each moment more fully grown.”
Rilke’s image illustrates how being half here in our work lives is like being half-removed from what Whyte calls our “elemental waters.” An identity built on speed, velocity, urgency, and madness takes us further afield from our actual core and the wholehearted lives we could have.
There’s a flimsiness or hollowness to this kind of work identity that can as Whyte suggests, “almost immediately fall apart and disintegrate” at the first sign of mortality, loss, collapse, or humiliation: “Speed seems to speak of movement but it actually glues us into whatever immobile, unattending identity we have constructed.”
Stopping and reflecting is the hard part; it’s why we are consumed with speed because we wish to avoid this hard work. Whyte writes, “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.” Whyte’s own friend admonishes him:
“You must do something heartfelt, and you must do it soon. Let go of all this effort, and let yourself down, however awkwardly, into the waters of the work you want for yourself. It’s all right, you know, to support yourself with something secondary until your work has ripened, but once it has ripened to a transparent fullness, it has to be gathered in. You have ripened already, and you are waiting to be brought in. Your exhaustion is a form of inner fermentation. You are beginning, ever so slowly” — he hesitated — “to rot on the vine.”
Wow. Harsh but to the point. What a friend to speak truth and counter the speed that can overwhelm a life and blur a person’s vision. Whyte’s own personal journey forces his readers to question whether we ourselves might be at that moment of fullness or far beyond it. Have we let ourselves down into the waves? Have we found that sense of rest, gaiety, and marvelous calm? What are those “elemental waters” for each of us? How can we move toward those waters of real belonging? What might bring us closer to that joyous buoyancy in work?
May we each be able to find our way to wholeheartedness, eschewing that seemingly inevitable speed.
Dr. Michelle R. Weise is the author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet and serves as an outsourced Chief Innovation/Learning/Impact Officer for businesses and higher education institutions.