Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of January. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.
WHOLEHEARTED
One of my core beliefs is that we are all called to live wholehearted lives. I aspire to live into that truth every day with varying degrees of success, and with sometimes slow but always steady progress. In my work, through speaking, writing and teaching, I invite others to aspire to the same.
It is a way of living that on the surface is hard to disagree with. I mean who would admit to wanting to live halfheartedly? And yet, what does it really mean to live with our whole heart? Our entire heart? All of it?
A friend recently reminded me of the truth found, but potentially overlooked, in the very title of David Whyte’s poem, Everything Is Waiting For You. The good news is that everything is waiting for us. The harder news is that everything is waiting for us. Everything. The good and the bad, the easy and the hard, the energizing and the exhausting, what we welcome and search for and what we dread and avoid. A whole heart has space for it all. (Hear David Whyte read Everything Is Waiting For You in his interview with Krista Tippett.)
In Autumn: A Season of Paradox, Parker Palmer, the educator, activist, and founder of The Center For Courage & Renewal puts it this way—“Split off from each other, neither darkness nor light is fit for human habitation. The moment we say “yes” to both of them and join their paradoxical dance, the two conspire to make us healthy and whole.” To live wholeheartedly means to encounter and engage with the truth of our lives, the whole of which can only be found by welcoming the dark as much as the light.
There are no two ways about it. Living a wholehearted life is not for the faint of heart. It is the most challenging, and the most exhilarating, work we will ever do. It’s why we are here.
