Crossing The Unknown Sea - Work As A Pilgrimage Of Identity, David Whyte

As you can see from the condition of this book, it has lived a life. A sign of its importance to me during the past decade, and no doubt beyond.

Pretending To Be Alive

We may do the same work and do it well, but we may do it well in a way that does not engage our deeper powers in any real conversation, so that we lose any sense of personal edge. We may be admired in our work, but the admiration blinds and insulates us from the loss of something robust and lifelike inside us.

We are impersonating, but the impersonation is incredibly subtle because we are, in effect, impersonating ourselves. The surface life is a simulacrum of something we intuit inside ourselves but have not yet really brought to life from the depths. All the while we are slowly in retreat from or own frontier. — p.73

This book was pivotal for me ten years ago, at a time when I chose to walk away from a more traditional and well-worn path, because I knew deeply that it was not my own. I have written something more along those lines, also partly inspired by David Whyte, which you can read here.

Utilising his own personal narrative throughout, David charts the transformation and realignment that is an ever necessary aspect of participating in the conversational nature of reality, as he puts it. To be at the frontier of ones identity and powers means leaning beyond what we might perceive as our edge, often limited by deeply held beliefs about ourselves which are often rooted in fear.

The world will ask (or sometimes demand) things of us, but we always have the ability to shape the conversation with our own responses, the unique way we each have of participating in this life. Likewise, there will be what we wish to happen, which will never occur exactly in the way we envisage because the very nature of unfolding possibility is subject to so many influences.

To deliberately hold this tension with purpose, free of excessive desire and tendencies to coerce or withdraw submissively, is not to float aimlessly, but to dwell with intention, to literally be in-tension.

The Law And The Outlaw

To preserve a sense of freedom even in the midst of rules and regulations is to preserve a part of our identities free from the strictures and responsibilities of success, career, and corporation. The measure of our continuing individuality in any work is the refusal to be swallowed by our goals, our ambitions, or our company no matter how marvelous they may be. In order to live happily within outer laws, we must have a part of us that goes its own way, that is blessedly outlaw no matter the outward conditions or rewards. — p.156

To find the roots of our responsibilities, we must go to the roots of our abilities, a journey into a core sense of ourselves where we can put together an understanding of how we are made, why we have the responsibilities we have, and, just as important, the images that formed us in our growing. We all have particular images of freedom, mischief, and radical individuality we carry deep inside ourselves which can help us to throw off the tyranny of a situation, our own indomitable stubbornness, a difficult boss, or a repressive organization. — p.157

Let's look again at that subtitle, 'Work As A Pilgrimage Of Identity'. What comes to my mind now is about the central important of that word pilgrimage. I am thinking of proceeding with deep longing, a faith in ourselves and the vitality our sense of destination offers, but all the while knowing that the journey itself is the only destination truly possible.

Meeting our desires for fulfilling and meaningful work will always require more of us than a daily arrival at and subsequent departure from a compartmentalised and distant 'working self'. There must be feet on the ground, the sole or perhaps soul grounded and earthed in full contact with our work, to have 'skin in the game'. What I feel David is advocating for is not the kind of inner fragmentation which sees us needing to enter into our work lives as some separate identity, but that the nature of bringing oneself fully to the work will inevitably require the ability to robustly protect what is most precious, during times when the core of one's identity, desire, or imagination feels under threat.

There is only movement, and perhaps only arrival. David Whyte has suggested that what we commit ourselves to is ultimately a horizon, rather than a destination. Perhaps that is also the true nature of pilgrimage, that it continues, and upon arrival at the horizon we spent so much time and effort working our way towards, once there we find that something else inevitably beckons, again calling for commitment in leaning beyond our familiar edges, into what is truly new.

By working together through online Mentoring & Life Coaching, or in Psychotherapy, we can explore your relationship to work and purpose, and the horizon that you are moving or wish to move towards. What are the fears that see you limit yourself (perhaps unwittingly), and struggle with the challenge of going 'just beyond yourself', to put it in David Whyte's terms?