Work as pilgrimage

Daily Reading for November 15

In work, it has always taken courage to follow a unique and individual path exactly, because making our own path takes us off the path, in directions which seem profoundly unsafe. A pilgrimage into the night and the night wind. The territory through which we must travel to make a life for ourselves is always more difficult than we could first imagine; it takes us to the cliff edges of life. The amusing part is that you can spend years preparing for the possibility of falling off the cliff and then find yourself suddenly under the cliff, approaching it from another, equally terrifying direction.

Finding a work to which we can dedicate ourselves always calls for some kind of courage, some form of heartfelt participation. It needs courage because the intrinsic worth of work lies in the fact that it connects us to larger, fiercer worlds where we are forced to remember first priorities. The farm laborer knows the toil that literally puts bread on the table. The police officer knows firsthand the invisible line between order and disorder in society. I remember a recent dinner conversation with a water utility executive who had been in the midst of a massive Turkish earthquake. Awake night after night, doing work that was not part of his official job description, he and his team brought water, medicines, and supplies to bereft, panicking communities. Once the crisis was past, he wondered if he would ever feel that aliveness and urgency again the rest of his days. He was wistful for the frontier encounter, the cliff edge. This cliff edge is a frontier where passion, belonging, and need call for our presence, our powers, and our absolute commitment. To approach work in this manner is not merely to look for constant excitement but to join a conversation with the great cycles of existence, cycles that often terrify us even as they call on the best of us.

From Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity by David Whyte (Riverhead Books, 2001).

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