202609261930 Crossing the Unknown Sea
In Crossing the Unknown Sea, David Whyte urges us to view work as a powerful path to fulfillment and purpose in our lives. He connects his varied life experiences leading him to a revelation that he wanted to live as a full-time poet with our often short-sighted and ill-considered view of work in our lives.
We all have a responsibility to ourselves, our families, our friends, and our co-workers to "wake the sleeping captain" of our lives. We often want to put ultimate responsibility on someone else, but no one can be alert, engaged, and fulfilled for us. We have to take that responsibility and begin our journey across the unknown sea.
We search for the horizon of attainment only to find upon arrival that there are new horizons, our ambitions are withered, our expertise is dwarfed, the attainment and struggling rendered meaningless, and we feel like imposters. As the zen koan goes, “How do you proceed from the top of a hundred foot pole?” This false arrival is a sign of misalignment between our desires and our labor. Do we really care if we have the biggest bank account? We might labor in these directions but we'll find on our deathbeds that the labors that mattered are the labors of love and life. We strive for a big house but we only remember building a home with those we love.
We need to find alignment and purpose in our work. We must be like the sheepdog that doesn’t run but moves the heard with a precise economy of motion. The dry-stone wall builder who finds the perfect fit between the seams in the bricks and understands the future settling of the wall. This involves searching for yet more new horizons and shores. We must frequently be outlaws, mischievous, answering to a higher law, power, or way in order to see with fresh eyes, to have courage, to be wholehearted, and to find what we're striving for.
There are no roads on the sea, only paths taken, wakes left, and the celestial for guidance. We must have Keats's Negative Capability — capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason. We must be comfortable with the pause between, we must be mindful of the numinous in the days. Creativity requires heart, anticipation, and passion but also fear, loss, difficulty, high stakes, and the possibility of failure. It is hard to find our inner creativity and harder to inspire a whole group of people to all live at the frontier cliff’s edge of creativity. It's hardest yet to inspire people to leap over the precipice like an albatross youngling defying the jagged rocks and frozen ocean below. But if we dare, we may fly and arrive on new shores. Often we arrive penniless on those new shores after the striving — destitute and bereft of the comfort, familiarity, and safety of our old lands or even the long journey. We are reborn but we begin anew in conversation and harmony with the universe.
In work as in life, we must contemplate the loss of everything in order to know what we have to give; it is the essence of writing, the essence of working, the essence of living; an essence that we look for by hazarding our best gifts in the world, and in that per-spective, all of us are young and have the possibilities of the young until our last breath goes out. (pp. 245)1
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Technology's life saving and life changing gifts only make sense when cradled by a network of human conversation, a robust conversation that forms a parallel human network just as powerful as our computer networks, holding any technology to standards of sense and meaning, ethics and personal freedom. (pp. 239)1
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