This week marked 100 days of my Project Blank Canvas indulgence.
I wrote a whole slew of words on this enjoyable era, to mark the occasion, but the editor – swine! – cut it for being ‘overly inwardly gazing ramble babble’. I promised to never show up with such copy again on this page, and so it sits scattered over the cutting room floor. Perhaps we’ll come back to that, perhaps not!
Though, I have to share that flicking through a notebook, it was fun to see a quote from the English-Irish poet David Whyte from the early days of career pause.
Mid-way walking home along the waterfront, from the dentist, on the first Friday after leaving work, I had this interview with David Whyte in my ears. The timing of listening to this interview was apt, as the conversation meandered into a discussion about seasons in our lives, and how slowly we evolve during.
Indulging in the feeling of time being able to stretch to my own whims, I wandered into a cafe for a tea, just to re-listen and write down an excerpt:
“You always meet the new you – in the mirror – in the the form of a stranger.
And, you should know that you always turn away from that stranger because you are afraid of them to begin with.
The beauty of being alive is that you get the time to turn your face back. And you have to get to know the person you are becoming.
I’ll often think that most humans are a good 7-10 years behind who they’ve actually become. Our strategic mind hasn’t caught up yet with the central imagination that has already arrived on the other side”.
Whyte continued to share his observation that we really have three marriages in life (eh hem, let’s play along…!), with which we’re in continuous conversation: our partner, there is our work…and then there is ourselves.
Each of these, especially our relationship with ourselves, and who we really are – “that tricky moveable frontier” as Whyte playfully calls it – needs an anchor to a long-term horizon to which we’re dedicated in the long run.
And, we keep these three relationships alive through continually bringing a lens of delight and curiosity. In our work in particular, we have to keep letting the attachment go, to see how it comes back to us, to keep an eros of our work alive. (By 2023, after 15 years of very challenging ‘Fund I’ capital raising, I’ll admit to my eros getting a little flaccid…).
I liked the reminder as to just how rich and important the ‘inter regnum’ periods are – spaces where nothing is allowed to happen, giving us the time and space to be valuably saying no, until we get to a big new “Yes” (and how this concept in his life was rooted in the Catholic theological tradition of Via Negativa, a reference that is not to being negative, but rather to saying ‘no’ until we feel a clear ‘yes’).
I should add that poet Whyte’s caution is that we can be constantly choosing too early in these marriages, our strategic mind throwing up black and white and binary questions (noted!) – “because this is the easiest way to approach things” – while there is so much to explore in between.
Accepting that our ‘strategic mind’ is many years slower than our ‘imaginative mind’ (which I suspect, never gives up on some of its dreams), we have the riddle of how today can we be some kind of ancestor, or parent within ourselves, to the kind of future that we want a bundle of years down the line.
It was funny too, last week, to finish flicking through Kevin Kelly’s Excellent Advice for Living: Advice I Wish I’d Known Earlier, and see another riddle in Kelly’s closing quippet of wisdow:
