When I hear of work life balance I think of this guy on the see saw. How stressed does he look? My insight into the shallowness of the term Worklife balance came about after meeting David Whyte the poet (and much more). David is at his best when reading his own poetry. He’s also a story teller (in my opinion) and tells stories about story telling. A classic I heard on one of his CDs I will tell you another time soon.
David suggests rather provocatively, that we have three types of marriage in our life. The first marriage is to another person and this marriage is emblematic of our relationships and place in the world; the second marriage is to our work, and third is our ever-changing marriage to ourselves.
The metaphor does raise questions about the kind of relationship we have with our work, with our ‘self’ at work, and how this effects our other relationships.
In David Whyte’s book “Crossing the Unknown Sea” (Penguin, 2002) he tells a story about the need to become ‘wholehearted’ in our relationship with our work. After years of working in an office environment he describes how he ended up lost and looking for himself “in a swampy morass of stress and speed”. When things came to a head one day, he returned home in the final humiliation of burnout, and spoke in desperation to his friend, the monk and writer, Brother David Steidl Rast:
“ I looked up at Brother David, the nearest thing to a truly wise person in my life and found myself almost blurting.
“Brother David?”
I uttered it in such an old petitionary, Catholic way that I almost thought he was going to say, “Yes my son?” But he did not; he turned his face towards me, following the spontaneous note of desperate sincerity and simply waited.
“Tell me about exhaustion”, I said.
He looked at me with an acute, searching, compassionate ferocity for the briefest of moments, as if trying to sum up the entirety of the situation and without missing a beat, as if he had been waiting all along, to say a life-changing thing to me. He said, in the form of both a question and an assertion:
“You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?”
“The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest” I repeated woodenly, as if I might exhaust myself completely before reaching the end of the sentence. “What is it then?”
“The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness”. ” (p132).
I love this story – partly because it sums up the kinds of possibilities there might be if we ask the right questions of the right people; if we imagine hard enough what it is we want; and if we start to have the right conversations about our work and life. Who knows we might find a marriage between the two (or three!). No more balancing. I like it.
Have a good week.
barry
PS. David Whyte is launching his new book this week Jan 28th.
The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self & Relationship.
Thinking of work, self and other as three marriages offers the possibility of living them out in a way in which they are not put into competition with one another, where each of the marriages can protect, embolden and enliven the others and help keep us mutually honest, relevant, authentic and alive.
Comments 1
Hello everyone
I am in college and now I feel I have to give everything I have to my course seven days a week. The course I theology and I will benefit I will know more about world and be and become more of an analytical thinker but I am hesitant to give all this time even thought I have too.
I will sacrifice personal meditation practice, meditation meetings (GP) to do well but it’s only for a year and a half more and hopefully provides me with a job.
It seems the best option is to wholehartly embrace the course and learn to change. Is their advice that could give me clarity on what im going through and what views to hold to succeed with so much work?
Thanks Thomas