There is a line in the poem Sweet Darkness, by David White, which reads “Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.”
On the morning someone read this to me, it echoed a line from a guided meditation which invited us to give up trying to be special, to just be our own true self. This sense of being my right self, this sense of belonging has been a long time coming for me. But here I am. Here. Now.
And now that I am feeling it; people are beginning to comment on aspects of it - on how I look, on how I have grown, on my approach to things. For myself, I am still not entirely sure how I got here, so that is something I continue to think about and write about.
I believe that we do, ultimately, get to choose our world, our reality, the realm in which we live out our earthly existence – not on a whim or a wish, but by doing the work, making the effort, even in the darkness, especially when the work is hard, and we are tired.
We choose our world by creating it, by loving even when we are hurting, by continuing when we are lost, when we have lost.
We can choose to live in the darkness of anger, fear, regret. Or we can keep lighting our stubby little candles, with our damp and broken matches. Yes, we will find some of them splutter and die, but most of them will shine bright and true and light our next few footsteps along the way, and every so often one will turn out to be a brilliant, sparkling, colourful firework to delight us.
When the world fails us, as it sometimes will, when people fail us, as they sometimes do, we need to remember it is only the external world, only people, it is not our self or soul that is failing. We can hold ourselves gently. We can nurture and nourish our strength, call upon our resilience, we can make the world, our world, better. Not on a whim or a wish, but by doing the work.
The work we choose to do and how we choose to do it creates our world.
There is a quote from one of the ancients “Carrying water, chopping wood.” It stands unexplained in my book, so I get to decide how to interpret it. I see it as an invitation to be mindful in the mundanity of life, in the everyday actions, for that is how we create our world. There are no menial tasks. Everything we do is a thread of our existence. Everything we say sends an echo into the universe. It does matter. All of it.
In my working life, I was fond of saying – to managers and direct reports and suppliers and customers alike – “my job is to make your job easier..”
I still believe that. My job is to make your job easier.
There is an African saying: I am, because we are.
That is so very true – and I believe that its opposite also has value. “We” are, because I am…because I am doing what I can to be part of the ‘we’. I believe in circularity. Reciprocity.
I work differently now. I'm no longer concerned with whether people get paid on time, or getting a team of people to understand how they contributed to making other people's lives so much better, even when the organisation didn't credit their efforts, or ensuring we stayed on the right side of the law. I'm no longer concerned with deep interpretation of what the law actually means in practice. I confess I got tired with the futility of all of that. Trying to make so many people's jobs easier got to be too much in the end, when so many other people were working to make mine harder.
Now I work on the page rather than out in the world, but it is still (or perhaps 'again') with the intention of making something, for someone, somewhere, easier. I want the words to touch souls, to reach into the beauty and wisdom of our common being, to soothe or to challenge.
I freely admit that I do this for myself as much as I do it for anyone else.
While I am working to put some love (and beauty and wisdom) into lives I otherwise might not touch, I am also working to create my own world, so that my long-held sense of unbelonging dissipates.
The world I create for myself is by definition one in which I truly belong.
The world I create for myself is both small and immense. It is the world as I choose to see it, in any given moment.
Take this moment for example. I am writing this at home, just as the sun is coming up on a bright autumn morning. I did not choose or create that sky, but I am up early enough to see it. To watch and appreciate a sunrise is no small thing.
I am writing this sitting at my solid wooden dining table. It was an expensive piece of furniture that I could scarcely afford at the time I bought it, and I remember how I treasured it, kept walking into the dining room to look at it, touch it. I may have been a little in awe of it, of the wonder of my owning it. Now it is chipped and scratched, marks that polish will not hide. It has found a place in my new home – a place for shared meals and conversation, a workplace, a dumping ground for books and prompts and works in progress. It is after all a table. Its function is to keep things off the floor. No matter how marked and worn it becomes, it will still be a table.
And sometimes I clear it of its accumulation of clutter. Polish it. Appreciate it all over again. Sometimes I place a lighted candle upon it and lay out the cards. Sometimes it becomes a place of ritual.
Does this table belong to me? Or is it merely a way of creating a place where I belong?
I do not chop wood, or carry water. I am fortunate enough not to have to do so, but I do try to be mindful as I go through the ordinariness of my days: swimming, walking, tending my garden. Putting words into some kind of alignment and sending them out into the world, in case someone is waiting for them.
Sometimes they meet, the words and the person, and I take a deep pleasure in that.
I have chosen a world in which I can do this, one where I do not have to agonise over who does or does not appreciate my work, one in which I have no goals to meet, no KPIs, no deadlines, no annual appraisals. I have chosen this world, not on a whim or a wish, but with deliberation and intention, and by having done and continuing to do the work.
The work of earning a living, while designing a life. The work of loving and losing. The work of learning. The work of trying and failing and hurting, The work of healing.
The hardest work has been that involved in finding my self and learning to trust her. It is still work in progress. I lose her in the darkness at times, but now I know that if I sit silent in that dark, she will call to me, and I will find her again.
Sometimes the work is simply to sit quietly in the dark, listening. Sometimes that is when we hear the answer to the questions: what kind of world do I want to live in and how do I set about creating it? Then we simply begin. We begin by making a wish, but we continue by doing the work.
