To Keep the Contours of Choice Porous
Though choice deepens and incarnates a way of life, your soul and imagination have an immensity and diversity that can neither be reduced to nor accommodated in your chosen path. If you neglect your own immensity, your life-path itself becomes repressive and unnatural. It cannot unfurl in its own natural rhythm. You have to push your way through; your life becomes over-deliberate. Every action and movement has to be forcibly chosen. You try to keep yourself together. You do not feel that you have taken a wrong path. No. This is the way life is. One cannot drift endlessly. Eventually some direction must be taken. That is all you have done. Yet you feel disproportionately disappointed; it is as if you have given up something that was unfairly demanded of you. Eventually it becomes easier. You have made the compromise that everyone seems to have to make at a certain point. You do not have to force yourself as you did at the beginning. Gradually something seems to close off within you and habit takes over so smoothly. Now it all happens automatically. You have achieved cohesion and stability in your life, but you have paid an awful price—the death of your longing and the loss of the future you long for.
“Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing.”
A life’s journey is made up of continual daily choices. But there are moments of profound choosing, when a partner, a life-direction, or a new way of being in the world is chosen. This can be a wonderful time of focus and re-direction. When such a moment of choosing is genuine, it is usually preceded by a time of gestation and gathering. Many different strands of your past experience begin to weave together until gradually the new direction announces itself. Its voice is sure with the inevitability of the truth. When your life-decisions emerge in this way from the matrix of your experience, they warrant your trust and commitment. When you can choose in this way, you move gracefully within the deeper rhythm of your soul. The geography of your destiny is always clearer to the eye of your soul than to the intentions and the needs of your surface mind. Wordsworth says in “The Prelude,” “Soul, that art the eternity of thought.” The eye of the soul can see in all directions. When you truly listen to the voice of your soul, you awaken your kinship with the eternal urgency that longs to lead you home. The deepest call to a creative life comes from within your own interiority. It may be awakened or occasioned by a person or situation outside you, yet the surest voice arises from your own secret depth. The surest choosing grows out of the natural soil of experience. The Buddhists say, “When the apple is ripe, it falls of itself from the Tree.”
When we come to moments of profound choosing, we need to be careful about how and where we draw the lines of our choice. Even though a choice sets the fundamental direction of your life, it should not hermetically seal you off from the rest of life. The outer lines of choice should remain porous. Though we always end up having to choose, choice itself remains a mystery, utterly opaque, no matter how much we deliberate. Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” shows how, after the event, we achieve clarity and self-importance in dramatizing choices already made. But the choice we made is, was, and remains mysterious. We are fashioned from the earth, are clay shapes in human form. We are children of Nature, where borders are seldom sealed. Underneath our walls and city streets, left to itself, the earth is still one ever-changing field. In order for life to flow, frontiers must remain porous. Nowhere is this more evident than the outer frontier of the human body, our skin. Skin is porous and in a constant interflow with nature. Were it to seal itself off in some hermetic act, it would kill the body. Similarly, the outer lines of a clear choice or life-path should also remain porous in order to allow our other unchosen lives to continue to bless us.
Great Choices Need the Shelter of Blessing
Such moments of choosing are also moments of great vulnerability. Often, there seems to be a dark side to destiny; it gathers to conspire against the freshly formed choice or chosen direction. The act of making a profound choice lifts one out of the level shelter of the crowd. There is the Daoist saying “The wind in the forest always hits the tallest trees.” A choice creates clearance. In this new space, the unknown has clear sights on the individual. No obstacles blur the target. Literary tragedy offers a profound exploration of this vulnerability. With passion, the tragic hero makes a choice. Unknown to him, he stumbles against some divine law. The choice that opened the glimpse of a wonderful journey and possibility squeezes and tightens now like a noose around the protagonist’s neck. The terrible consequences of the passionately chosen path begin to collapse underneath the hero and destroy him and his world. The transfiguration in tragedy is the hero’s recognition of the secret order that he unintentionally violated.
When the garden of your unchosen lives has enough space to breathe beneath your chosen path, your life enjoys a vitality and a sense of creative tension. Rilke refers to this as “the repository of unlived things.” You know that you have not compromised the immensity that you carry, and in which you participate. You have not avoided the call of commitment; yet you hold your loyalty to your chosen path in such a way as to be true to the blessings and dangers of life’s passionate sacramentality. No life is single. Around and beneath each life is the living presence of these adjacencies. Often, it is not the fact of our choosing that is vital, but rather the way we hold that choice. In so far as we can, we should ensure that our chosen path is not a flight from complexity. If we opt for complacency, we exclude ourselves from the adventure of being human. Where all danger is neutralized, nothing can ever grow. To keep the borders of choice porous demands critical vigilance and affective hospitality. To live in such a way invites risk and engages complexity. Life cannot be neatly compartmentalized. Once the psyche is engaged with such invitation and courage, it is no longer possible to practise tidy psychological housekeeping. To keep one’s views and convictions permeable is to risk the intake of new possibility, which can lead to awkward change. Yet the integrity of growth demands such courage and vulnerability from us; otherwise the tissues of our sensibility atrophy and we become trapped behind the same predictable mask of behaviour.
To Be Faithful to Your Longing
To live in such a hospitable way brings many challenges. In marriage or with a life’s partner, it demands trust and flexibility in the commitment. Many relationships die quietly soon after the initial commitment. They lose their passion and adventure. The relationship becomes an arrangement. This often happens because the couple renege on a plurality of other friendships as central to their lives. Even though you have one anam-cara, one to whom you are committed, one who reaches you where no one else can or will, this person cannot become the absolute mirror for your life. To expect any one individual to satisfy your life-longing is a completely unjust demand. No one could live up to that expectation. The self is not singular. There are many selves within the one individual. Different friends awaken and reach different selves within you. Different gifts and different challenges come through your different friendships. To hold the borders of your commitment open allows you to give and receive from others without necessarily endangering the sacredness of your anam-cara bond. In fact, it can enrich and deepen the primordial and permanent intimacy between you. To live with this porousness can at times lead to ambivalence, but with discernment and integrity that need not become destructive. This art of living is vital in the workplace. This porousness often allows the alternative light to come through so that you do not have a blind faith in the system. You can still work committedly and creatively and yet recognize the surrounding functionalism and refrain from giving yourself totally and making yourself permanently vulnerable.