What do we do when what we want most remains out of our reach, not for any external reason but because of all the internal ones? This is a question that has fascinated me for year amidst the work I do, which regularly attempts to unlock or open seekers’ best wisdom—their own—by encouraging/urging/goading/irritating them enough to act, to risk it, to expand to the next greatest possibility for significance, meaning, delight in their lives. As I fail at this regularly, and those with whom I share my life do too, I like to think of it as the long defeat (ala Tolkien’s LoTRs).
Yet there is absolutely no better way to spend a life. In the words of Mumford & Sons, “where you invest your love, you invest your life.” Or Clarissa Pinkola Estés: living open-hearted, knowing the pain and choosing openness again and again, is the only way. In one of her closing poems, she articulates the secret to this kind of life: “Climb the tallest tree you know. Look at the branch you think might break under your weight. Step out onto that branch.”
Allow me a couple hypotheticals. Say there’s an academic who is slowly discovering that she writes most fluently when she lives at the cusp of body-building, strength-training. She is unaware of pursuing public avenues for such things, and has no intention or clearly articulated end-point, goal for this path. If she winds up losing weight because of this pursuit, great. If not, great. At some point, the aim was articulated at simply: not feeling self-loathing anymore, especially when focusing mind at the mid-section. That’s it. That’s all. Not much, but still something never accomplished in over four decades of life. As she walks the path, the loathing lessens, from time to time. She smiles, from her core.
Or another. This one is more familiar with ministry students, for instance. Say there’s a young man seeking connection, a deepening intimacy he seems to know already, recognize, but yet he says he doesn’t. He smiles when he says he has “intimacy issues.” He expresses an articulate desire to confront them gently, wisely, slowly. He sees a fullness of life in those who have learned to risk into relational space, and yearns, regularly, for such connection, such fullness. At every opening, there’s an articulate ‘yes’ alongside an enacted ‘no thanks.’ What he says he wants most remains always just out of reach. Openings come every day, but something internal obstructs. Those around him can count on it, anticipate it, see it when it happens. Again and again.
In these situations, which is the unintended lie? The avoidance of loathing with pretending it doesn’t matter? The desire for intimacy—with self or with other? Or is it the desire itself that deceives? The mind says it wants release from loathing, but the decades of companionship with it are so familiar. It’s better to know the life that’s painful than it is to risk into what might be worse but could be best. Or the fellow who yearns for connection but only knows how to shadow the language, to speak the desire but never push into it far enough for any satisfaction. Which is the lie, and how does one know?
How do people of Spirit discern? The wise-ones who have all the patience in the world, it seems? Who smile in the face of fear (thanks, Pema Chodron) or open hearts again and again (Thich Nhat Hanh, or Baal Shem Tov) to anyone and everything that needs them but needs more to resist them?
I think the answer lies in smiling at the resistance, expecting the deception, and loving whole-heartedly anyway. There’s just enough absurdity in that to hear a gospel ring. Or a bodhisattva vow. Or a gentleness of spirit that comes with practice, practice, and more practice. Such is devotion, the branch that can never hold anyone’s weight but nevertheless never breaks.
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