Success ! ? ! ?

Success can be the greatest barrier to stopping, to quiet, to opening up the radically different form of conversation that is necessary for understanding this larger sense of self. Our very success can be the cause of a greater anxiety for further preservation of our success.

Our highly evolved ability to worry and become anxious may have conferred us with survival advantages but it also gave us the ability to sit beneath a magnificent sky and not see a single star, to sit by ourselves and not have an inkling of who that self is, to spend most of a life providing for a family while neglecting to spend the time with them that is an expression of the love that all the providing is supposed to represent. Anxiety about our world, about ourselves; our constant need to compare and contrast ourselves with others, our constant attempt to identify exactly where on the map we find ourselves, divides us from creation.

Do you want a life that is bigger than, more whole than the part of you that worries? is anxious? is searching for success?

The pursuit of self is the pursuit of that part of us not defined by our worries and anxieties. But, this pursuit begins only by admitting that human anxiety is endless and to be expected.

The pursuit of self is also the pursuit of that part of us that is untouched by our successes and accomplishments.

We get there to begin with by stopping.

Stopping is not passive; stopping allows us to look at the world as if we have seen it for the first time. Stopping stops us from keeping things alive beyond their appointed time.

David Whyte,
The Three Marriages

Kristen Bentley