Beautiful questions to shape a beautiful mind

What can I be wholehearted about?

‘The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness,’ a friend once told me. ‘You’re so exhausted because you can’t be wholehearted at what you’re doing… because your real conversation with life is through poetry.’ It was just the start of a long road that was to take my real work out into the world; but it was a beginning. What do I care most about – in my vocation, in my family life, in my heart and mind? This is a conversation that we all must have with ourselves at every stage of our lives, a conversation that we so often don’t want to have. We will get to it, we say, when the kids are grown, when there is enough money in the bank, when we are retired, perhaps when we are dead; it will be easier then. But we need to ask it now: what can I be wholehearted about now?

Am I harvesting from this year’s season of life?

‘Youth is wasted on the young,’ goes 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, live four or five years behind the curve of their own transformation. 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 anymore. 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.

Where is the temple of my adult aloneness?

In 1996, I wrote a poem called The House of Belonging (p. 40). In it, I spoke about the small, beautifully old house I came to live in after the end of my first marriage. In the poem, I wrote: ‘This is the temple of my adult aloneness and I belong to that aloneness as I belong to my life.’ There was a great deal of grief in letting go of the old, but I was so very excited about my new home. I felt that even though it was such a small house and an old house, it had endless new horizons for me, as if the rest of my life was just beginning from that place. It is important to have the equivalent of this house at every crucial stage in our lives. Where do you have that feeling of home? Where do you have that sense of spaciousness with the horizon and with your future?

Can I be quiet – even inside?

All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must learn how to be alone – and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment. Being quiet in the midst of a frenetic life is like picking up a new instrument. No one, not even you, wants to listen to you at first. But one day, there is a beautiful succession of notes and, yes, you have played a brief, gifted, much appreciated passage of music. This is also true for the silence inside you; you may not want to confront it at first. But a long way down the road, when you inhabit a space fully, you no longer feel awkward and lonely. Silence turns, in effect, into its opposite, so it becomes not only a place to be alone but also a place that is an invitation to others to join you, to want to know who’s there, in the quiet.

Am I too inflexible in my relationship to time?

In Ireland, where I spend a great deal of time, they say, ‘The thing about the past is that it isn’t the past.’ Sometimes we forget that we don’t have to choose between the past or the present or the future. We can live all of these levels at once. (In fact, we don’t have a choice about the matter.) If you’ve got a wonderful memory of your childhood, it should live within you. If you’ve got a challenging relationship with a parent, that should be there as part of your identity now, both in your strengths and weaknesses. The way we anticipate the future forms our identity now. Time taken too literally can be a tyranny. We are never one thing; we are a conversation – everything we have been, everything we are now and every possibility we could be in the future.

How can I drink from the deep well of things as they are?

In the West of Ireland, there are very old, very sacred wells everywhere. The locals call them ‘blessed wells’ or ‘holy wells’. At these wells, you find notes to the dead, bits of ribbon, keepsakes that people have left when they’ve said a prayer for a child or someone who’s sick. So to me, a well, a place where the water springs eternal all year round, is a very real, blessed place to stop and think. Almost always, when I’m struggling with a particular situation, I realise that I am only looking at the surface of the problem and refusing to go for the deeper dynamic that caused all the tension in the first place. All intimate relationships – close friendships and good marriages – are based on continued and mutual forgiveness. You will always trespass upon your friend’s sensibilities at one time or another, or your spouse’s. The only question is: will you forgive the other person? And more importantly: will you forgive yourself? We have to deepen our understanding, make ourselves more equal to circumstances, become more at ease with what we have been given or not given. We must drink from the deep well of things as they are.

Can I live a courageous life?

If you look at the root of the word ‘courage’, it doesn’t mean running under the machine gun bullets of the enemy, wearing a Sylvester Stallone headband, with glistening biceps and bandoliers of ammunition around one’s neck. The word ‘courage’ comes from the old French word cœur meaning ‘heart’. So ‘courage’ is the measure of your heartfelt participation in the world. Human beings are constantly trying to take courageous paths in their lives: in their marriages, in their relationships, in their work and with themselves. But the human way is to hope that there’s a way to take that courageous step – without having one’s heart broken. And it’s my contention that there is no sincere path a human being can take without breaking his or her heart. There is no marriage, no matter how happy, that won’t at times find you wanting and break your heart. In raising a family, there is no way to be a good mother or father without a child breaking that parental heart. In a good job, a good vocation, if we are sincere about our contribution, our work will always find us wanting at times. In an individual life, if we are sincere about examining our own integrity, we should, if we are really serious, at times, be existentially disappointed with ourselves. So it can be a lovely, merciful thing to think: ‘Actually, there is no path I can take without having my heart broken, so why not get on with it and stop wanting these extra special circumstances which stop me from doing something courageous?’