Life is not the Olympics…

David Whyte:

I often think that one of the great qualities that’s necessary for every human being, besides a generous and attentive heart and mind, is a sense of self-compassion for the way that you’re made in particular. That you wouldn’t lose faith, no matter what, in your own difficulties and awkwardnesses. And that some of your own awkward ways of being in the world are actually necessary to your final confrontation with existence. And that you couldn’t get there without somehow being bereft in certain ways, by having certain failings, that those failings are actually a core part of our experience of the numinous.

I do think that we diminish ourselves with many of the images that we hold for success in life so that we feel as if in order to get to any kind of extraordinary experience in life we have to cross the finishing line like some Olympic athlete. But I do believe that there are many experiences in life, many extraordinary edges that you can only actually crawl into on your hands and knees. That part of the experience of the final meeting would be missing if you did not actually follow the whole vulnerable contour of your own imperfect belonging into the fullness of the experience.