Am I Harvesting from This Year's Season of Life?

November 10, 2020

Am I Harvesting from This Year's Season of Life?

May 29, 2023

David Whyte is one of my favorite poet/philosophers. In this practical ruminating essay, he outlines 10 questions that have no right to go away including “Do I know how to have a real conversation?” and “Am I too inflexible in my relationship to time?” But, my favorite is his question that defines today’s post and his juicy gems below.

“‘Youth is wasted on the young’ is the old saying. But it might also be said that midlife is wasted on those in their 50s and eldership is very often wasted on the old. Most people, I believe, are living four or five years behind the curve of their own transformation. I see it all the time, in my own life and others. The temptation is to stay in a place where we were previously comfortable, making it difficult to move to the frontier that we're actually on now. People usually only come to this frontier when they have had a terrible loss in their life or they've been fired or some other trauma breaks open their story. Then they can't tell that story any more. But having spent so much time away from what is real, they hit present reality with such impact that they break apart on contact with the true circumstance. So the trick is to catch up with the conversation and stay with it —where am I now?—and not let ourselves become abstracted from what is actually occurring around us.”

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