Excerpt
Courage and Conversation: Setting Out With A Firm Persuasion
Then I asked: Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? He replied: All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.
?William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Work is a very serious matter in almost all respects, whether it is work in theshelter of our home or work in the big, wide, dangerous world. Through work,human beings earn for themselves and their families, make a difficult worldhabitable, and with imagination, create some meaning from what they do and howthey do it. The human approach to work can be naive, fatalistic, power-mad,money-grubbing, unenthusiastic, cynical, detached, and obsessive. It can also beselflessly mature, revelatory and life giving; mature in its long-reachingeffects, and life giving in the way it gives back to an individual or society asmuch as it has taken. Almost always it is both, a sky full of light and dark,with all the varied weather of an individual life blowing through it.
There is no hiding from work in one form or another. Under the great sky ofour endeavors we live our lives, growing we hope, through its seasons towardsome kind of greater perspective. Any perspective is dearly won. Maturity andenergy in our work is not granted freely to human beings but must be adventuredand discovered, cultivated and earned. It is the result of application,dedication, an indispensable sense of humor, and above all a never-endingcourageous conversation with ourselves, those with whom we work, and those whomwe serve. It is a long journey; it calls on both the ardors of youth and theperspectives of a longer view. It is achieved through a lifelong pilgrimage.
William Blake, that unstoppable creator, as both poet and engraver seemed tohave a direct and conversational relationship with the wellsprings of work. Overa lifetime he exhibited a continual inspiration, a profound vision and anindomitable ability, despite his poverty, to follow through with the tiniestdetails of his art. Blake called his sense of dedication a firm persuasion. Tohave a firm persuasion in our work?to feel that what we do is right forourselves and good for the world at the exactly same time?is one of the greattriumphs of human existence. We do feel, when we have work that is challengingand enlarging and that seems to be doing something for others, as if, in Blake'swords, we could move mountains, as if we could call the world home; and for awhile, in our imaginations, no matter the small size of our apartment, we dwellin a spacious house with endless horizons.
"My fingers Emit sparks of fire with Expectation of my future labours," saidthe passionate Blake, in a letter promising plenty of hard work to his patron,Hayley. He was speaking from a felt sense of fulfillment and from the very lastpart of the eighteenth century, an age when our Western ideas of work were goingthrough enormous change, an age when the factory was born, and production in andfor itself was first conceived as an imaginative good. But Blake stood firm amidit all in his approach to work and in his writings, saying essentially nothinghad changed. Factory or farm, individuals needed a sense of belonging in theirwork, a conversation with something larger than themselves, a feltparticipation, and a touch of spiritual fulfillment and the mysteriousgenerative nature of that fulfillment. Blake might have said that they needed aconversation with the angels. Earning and providing were all very well, but oncethe basics were met, human beings naturally turned their inward and outward eyesto greater horizons.
Whether fulfillment lasts for a month or for a lifetime, most of us wouldnot complain of its appearance in our lives however long or short its stay. Ifwe cannot have Blake's lifelong experience of wonder and inspiration through ourlabors, we will take just the merest touch now and again. Some have experiencedfulfillment for only a few brief hours early on in their work lives and thenmeasured everything, secretly, against it since. Some have felt eager andengaged by their work for years and then walked into their office one finemorning to find their enthusiasms gone, their energies spent, their imaginationsengaged in secret ways, elsewhere.
To have a firm persuasion, to set out boldly in our work, is to make apilgrimage of our labors, to understand that the consummation of work lies notonly in what we have done, but who we have become while accomplishing the task.To see life and work as a pilgrimage is not a strategy for increased production(though by understanding the wellsprings of human creativity, there is everychance it might happen); it does not mean that we can lay out our careers inprecise stages, clearly and concisely, as to when, where and how everythingshould happen. All of our great artistic and religious traditions take equallygreat pains to inform us that we must never mistake a good career for good work.Life is a creative, intimate and unpredictable conversation if it is nothingelse, spoken or unspoken, and our life and our work are both the result of theparticular way we hold that passionate conversation. In Blake's sense, a firmpersuasion, was a form of self-knowledge; it was understood as a result, anoutcome, a bounty that came from paying close attention to an astonishing worldand the way each of us is made differently and uniquely for that world.
Faith And Work
Blake saw the great powers of life working on us like a kind of permanentgravity field, the currents of life acting and pulling upon us according to ourparticular heft and spiritual weight, our makeup and our nature. These currentssurround us and inform us whether we are in the kitchen or in the office, in thewoods alone, or crowded in a downtown elevator. To have a firm persuasion,according to Blake, we must come to know these currents that surround us in anintimate way and build a kind of faith from the directional movement thatresults from a close conversation with these elements. Almost like a sailconversing with the wind, every sail will respond differently to the elementsaccording to its shape and the vessel it propels. And the response of the sail,with a steady hand at the tiller, creates movement and direction. In thisconversation no one can get stuck for long; as an individual, you simply need topresent some surface area to life. In Woody Allen's words: Just show up; then itis only a question of direction.
Showing up for work is difficult. You would think not showing up would beimpossible for living, breathing human beings, but we know enough of ourselveson a bleak Monday morning, or certain co-workers of a bad day, to realize thatas human beings, we are the one part of creation that can refuse to be itself.Our bodies can be present in our work, but our hearts, minds, and imaginationscan be placed firmly in neutral or engaged elsewhere.
Faith And Doubt
Sometimes our hiding from others has been so successful that we can nolonger even find ourselves when we want to. We feel submerged, heavy, immovable,stuck forever in the mud of our own making. I think of the patterns of air thatcirculate around a plane's wing, lifting even the deadliest, heaviest part of usup and away, off the ground. Blake must have believed that every human being hasaccess to these metaphorical aerodynamics; he drew figures depicting the dramasof human existence, people flying, falling, coming to earth or spirallingupward. He thought of the artist as a whole man or woman, someone with utterfaith in the conversation, alert to the forces that stream around us. To wakenthis inner artist, we must assume a certain shape that puts us in conversationwith the elements; we must cultivate a kind of faith in the moving energiesaround us and the way they to come to our aid, give us lift, no matter ourcircumstances or difficulties.
If the Sun and Moon should doubt,
They'd immediately go out.
Blake said, sure of the brilliant and reflective nature of faith. Not thatany life is free from doubt, especially when it comes to our work and the placeswe work. Many's the time we gaze into the mirror in the course of a long worklife and see our own faces shaded and eclipsed by a complete loss of connectionwith our striving. The eyes dimmed, the professional smile false and forced. Wepick up the phone and make the call, though we have nothing to say.
Whatever doubt we have, Blake asks us to put that doubt in conversation withgrander, more eternal, more essential parts of ourselves. Underneath the face,underneath the surface professionalism, underneath the brief obituary in thepaper, there are forces grander than any individual human life at play. To losecontact with these forces is to lose a real sense of living, and especially ofliving a life we can call our own. Suicide, literal or metaphorical, is the lossof conversation with these forces. Any life, and any life's work, is a hiddenjourney, a secret code, deciphered in fits and starts. The details only giventruth by the whole, and the whole dependent on the detail.
Continues...
Excerpted from Crossing the Unknown Seaby David Whyte Copyright © 2002 by David Whyte. Excerpted by permission.
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