Your Whole Heart

Either you’re all in. With your whole heart.

Or you’re not.

There’s just no in-between.

Read this phenomenal excerpt from David Whyte’s book, “Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity.” (H/t to Billy Oppenheimer for providing.)

After years of loving the work he was doing at an environmental nonprofit, David Whyte started to burn out. On one particularly bad day at the office, “I felt as if I didn’t have an ounce of energy left to do the work I had been doing,” Whyte wrote. “I was so exhausted, so burned out, I just went home.” That night, as he often did, Whyte met up with a close friend—a Benedictine monk named Brother David Steindl-Rast—to read poetry over a couple glasses of wine. As Brother David read aloud, Whyte tried to follow along, “but I had my day on my mind, and the mind-numbing tiredness I was experiencing at work.” “Brother David?” Whyte blurted out, interrupting the reading. “Tell me about exhaustion.” Brother David studied Whyte’s face for a moment, saw both the seriousness and the exhaustion in his eyes, and replied, “You know the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?” “The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest,” Whyte repeated, making sure he heard him right. “What is it then?” “The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.” Brother David was one of the few people who knew that Whyte secretly wanted to be a poet, a path he’d stepped off of years earlier in favor of a more practical, sensible, respectable one. He also knew that suppressing what you really want in life is quietly exhausting work. “You are so tired through and through,” Brother David said, “because you are only half here.” The other half is constantly, invisibly at work—day after day, year after year—consumed by the task of pushing aside your deepest desires. And the strain of keeping up that kind of divided, half-here existence “will kill you after a while,” Brother David said. “You are like Rilke’s Swan in his awkward waddling across the ground…You only have to touch the elemental waters in your life,” stepping back onto the path you know you belong on.