We fall in love with ideas and stories we have of ourselves, our work, and the people in our lives, and we hold on to them tightly. Forgetting that change happens. Our attempt to “balance” work with relationships and self create an unnecessary burden —we are asking the wrong question.
In The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship Poet David Whyte says, “each of these three marriages is non negotiable. [...] Each represents a core conversation with life that seems necessary for almost all human beings and non of the marriages can be weakened or given up without a severe sense of internal damage.”
Our endless quest for finding a formula for success overlooks the difference between winning and succeeding. We want certainty, but pay little attention to the nature of the path. Many of us have already walked many paths in various parts of life, and may have experienced degrees of personal transformation along the way. But we cling onto the idea of a path to follow.
Says Whyte in River Flow: New & Selected Poems:
No Path
There is no path that goes all the way.
[Han Shan]
Not that it stops us looking
for the full continuation.
The one line in the poem
we can start and follow
straight to the end. The fixed belief
we can hold, facing a stranger
that saves us the trouble
of a real conversation.
But one day you are not
just imagining an empty chair
where your loved one sat.
You are not just telling a story
here the bridge is down
and there's nowhere to cross.
You are not just trying to pray
to a God you imagined
would keep you safe.
No, you've come to the place
where nothing you've done
will impress and nothing you
can promise will avert
the silent confrontation,
the place where
your body already seems to know
the way having kept
to the last its own secret
reconnaissance.
But still, there is no path
that goes all the way
one conversation leads
to another
one breath to the next
until
there is no breath at all
just
the inevitable
final release
of the burden.
And then
your life will
have to start
all over again
for you to know
even a little
of who you have been.
The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship by David Whyte is a thoughtful and soulful exploration on finding the central conversation that holds the three most important aspects of our lives together. “We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way,” he says.