Something Much Larger than Just Trying to Be Happy
Excerpt from What to Remember When Waking by David Whyte:
One of the great theological inherited understandings about an everyday human life is that it is absolutely and completely and totally and utterly unique. These forces, this particular tide, will never ever appear again. There'll be other elements, other individuals, other incarnations, but this incarnation, this threshold that you stand on, these qualities, these difficulties that you bring with your qualities and your virtues, have never been bound together before in such a potentiality.
I often think that if the rest of creation could actually speak, it would be looking at us wondering why we quibble about the details of living out our lives when everything around us and everything inside us is so utterly and totally unique.
Lying underneath this great theological dynamic is the understanding that every human being must remember the particularity of their own place here on earth, and their own qualities and the way they take joy and sadness in life.
A good well-felt sadness in life can be just as generous to others as a well-felt joy.
What we're talking about here, in many ways, is something much larger than just trying to be happy in life. Happiness is not a large enough word for the deeper satisfactions that human beings are searching for and will search for and have searched for through recorded time.
