Anxiety, Beauty, and the Unknown: A Map to Emotional Resilience with David Whyte

In this episode, David Whyte explores anxiety, beauty, and the unknown as a true map to emotional resilience. David shares how anxiety can be a doorway to deeper understanding and connection. He and Eric discuss the paradox of holding both joy and struggle, the surprising wisdom hidden in everyday emotions, and how poetry and language can bring us closer to the heart of life. This is an inspiring look at how we can build resilience by embracing life’s uncertainties.

Key Takeaways:

• Exploration of human emotions, particularly happiness and anxiety.
• The duality of human emotions and the internal struggle between positive and negative qualities.
• Insights from David's book"Constellations Two," focusing on the rehabilitation of common words and their deeper meanings.
• The significance of the parable of the two wolves in understanding personal struggles.
• The relationship between anxiety and unspoken truths about care and vulnerability.
• The role of poetry in expressing and understanding complex emotions.
• The importance of recognizing and embracing both happiness and unhappiness in life.
• The concept of horizons as boundaries that inspire imagination and growth.
• The idea that nagging in relationships can be a form of love and care.
• Encouragement to engage in meaningful conversations and reflect on personal emotional landscapes.

If you enjoyed this conversation with David Whyte, check out these other episodes:

The Art of Poetry and Prose with David Whyte

Beautiful and Powerful Poetry with Marilyn Nelson

The Power of Poetry with Ellen Bass

For full show notes, click here!

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You always get to your happiness through the traviles of
your discontent and your difficulties you have being in the
world and being at ease in the world, unhappiness is
actually knocking on our door, telling us this is the
way to happiness.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Or empower us.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
see what we don't have instead of what we do.
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep

(01:01):
themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
We often take ourselves so seriously, the name we carry,
the identity we've constructed, the projects we chase, and yet,
as David White reminds us, the whole endeavor might be
just slightly absurd. In this conversation, with poet David White,
we explore the deep truths that reveal themselves when we
let go of our need to name, to define, to fix.

(01:31):
David talks about anxiety as a mask for unspoken truths,
about the real meaning of care, and about the strange,
sacred humor that arises when we realize how much we
don't control. From zen coons to Irish folklore to yack
mangers in the Himalayas, David weaves together the poetic and
the practical, and somewhere in all of it he helps

(01:54):
us see that maybe the goal isn't to be extraordinary,
but to recognize the unordinary beauty of what's already here.
This is an episode about loosening our grip, living with paradox,
and letting language lead us closer to the world, not
away from it. I'm Eric Zimmer and this is the
one you feed. Hi, David, Welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
Very good to be with you again, Eric.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
Yes, I am very honored to have you back on.
I'm very excited to talk with you, and we're going
to be talking about your latest book, which is called
Consolations two, which is a series of essays about I
don't know if you call them common words, but words
that all of us would know that you are putting
under a little bit more of a microscope, I would say,
But before we get to that, let's start, like we

(02:39):
always do, with the parable and the parable. There's a
grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life,
there are two wolves inside of us that are always
at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things
like kindness and bravery and love, and the others a
bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.
And the grandchild stops and they think about it for
a second. They look up at their grandparent and they

(03:01):
say which one wins, And the grandparent says, the one
you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking
you what that parable means to you in your life
and in the work that you do.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Well, that parable would have meant something very different to
me a few decades ago than it does now, and
with all of my zen sitting and zen study, but
also the deep states of attention that poetry and walking around,
and I'd say, bring, I'd say, the one you feed
is the one that holds both together. Actually, that you

(03:35):
don't choose we're always choosing between what we think are
opposing qualities, and there's actually some invisible part of you
that's able to hold both horizons and to live in
the territory between those horizons. I was just working with
the story of the young Finn McCool out on the road.

(03:56):
He's taken in under the tutelage of a wild bandit
called Cormack McCall, and Cormack McCall takes the young Finn
under his wing and teaches him the ways of a warrior.
But he shows Finn this spear which is bound to
a tree with tight cloths, and it's bound to a

(04:18):
tree because this spear is so full of the spite
of killing, as it says in the Irish mythological tradition,
it's so full of the spite of killing that it
will kill anyone it comes across. And comic McCall says
to Finn, you must never unbind this unless your life
is at stake, and then you can unleash the spear

(04:41):
and use it. And so there's an understanding that we
mostly operate through cooperation through kindness, but there are times
for cutting through and for eliminating. I'm not saying people,
but eliminating qualities that are standing in your way, and
they take a kind of fierce, ruthless presence actually, and

(05:03):
so human beings have never been able to choose, just
from the standpoint of evolutionary survival, between their kind of
cooperative qualities that they hold and the necessity to take
a stand in the world that not choosing that ability
to hold both sides of the world. You could say,

(05:24):
these inner and outer horizons are very necessary and very powerful.
I often think that horizons are enormously powerful in an
individual human life. One of the essays in constellations to
is horizon, the way that we're constantly seeing edges between
what we know and what we do not know, and

(05:46):
the horizons out in the world are certainly representative of that.
There's nothing more beautiful than a far horizon to a
human being, whether it's mountains or the ocean or a
far plane. And we're finding out, actually through medical research,
that human beings are actually much calmer, much more at

(06:07):
home in the world, and much happier actually when they
are looking at a horizon, when they have their heads
up and their eyes gazing into the distance. And we
all know the forms of unhappiness we have from gazing
too closely at our screens, you know, whether it's a
phone or a laptop. But it's interesting to think that
we also have an inner horizon. We have a horizon

(06:30):
insiders between what we can understand or actually feel physically
about ourselves and what lies beneath. But we often feel
that horizon insiders as a horizon of resistance or disturbance.
We often see it as negative actually, because what lies

(06:51):
below will actually break apart what lies above. What lies below,
in many ways is the latest edge of our growing maturity,
but it's way beyond the life that we have actually
constructed for ourselves on the surface. So when you unbind
that spear inside yourself, it feels as if it's going

(07:14):
to destroy and kill your present life. And so the
ability to live with both what is nourishing in the
world and what feels like qualities that will end your
life is a real necessity. So the ability to actually
go inside yourself and physically lean against that horizon, almost

(07:35):
rest against it, and get used to what feels like
a horizon of resistance and disturbance until it opens into
something else. Often the qualities we feel there are what
in your story, your parable would be associated with the
consuming wolf, and so the ability to live in the

(07:57):
territory between those two horizons, to hold both wolves inside you,
is what is called foreign life.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
There are so many things you said there that I
would like to respond to, and I'm only going to
be able to hit a couple of them. But one,
when you were talking about fierceness, I couldn't help but
think about Manjuiciry, the Buddhist. Yeah, would you call him
a deity, a figure, it doesn't matter, but he wields
a flaming sword right to cut through delusion. I also

(08:25):
was thinking about in one of your essays you write
about Zen that one of the things about Zen is
it refuses to choose between different things. And then the
last piece I think underlies a lot of what I
think the book is pointing towards, which is that these
words that typically, as you said, might fall under bad

(08:46):
wolf category, or we might put under negative emotion category,
or however we want to label them, are actually very
useful and instructive. And when I look at the words
that I picked for us to talk about, is maybe
a personality test here in disguise Anxiety shame, guilt, injury,

(09:07):
nagging you, unhappiness. You know, I left alone, moon and
reverie and sojourn again. Diagnostic perhaps, yeah. But the point
is that the reason I picked those words is because
you help turn them on their head to a certain degree.
You help us see where indeed those things anxiety, shame,

(09:28):
guilt can be not good within us right, they can
be destructive, but they are also hugely constructive seen in
the right.

Speaker 1 (09:38):
Light, exactly. And that's the task of all these micro essays,
both in Consolations one and two, is to rehabilitate words
and language that we use against ourselves. My understanding is
that if there's a quality that we feel, whether it's
jealousy and hate, then there's a place for it in
the constellation of our identity. Actually, it's necessary to understand

(10:04):
what hate is saying to you, what anxiety is saying
to you. In my essay on unhappiness, which is one
of my favorite ones, I say, if we're happy now,
unhappiness is how we got here. You always get to
your happiness through the traviles of your discontent and your
difficulties you have being in the world and being at

(10:25):
ease in the world unhappiness is actually knocking on our
door telling us this is the way to happiness. So
it's a rehabilitation of so many parts of ourselves that
we've consigned to the negative, to one wolf or another.
When you're not supposed to choose, you're supposed to live
in the intimacy between them. And I'm thinking now of

(10:47):
a Zenko on where the end of the story says
that not knowing is most intimate. Not knowing is most
intimate when you can think about that in a love
relationship with your partner, your wife, your husband, and that
the more you can see them as if you've seen
them for the first time, the more possibility you have
of loving them for who they actually are, rather than

(11:09):
the delusory identity that you've granted them. It's a resentful
part of the partnership. And so, but also not knowing
allows you to look at a bird. You know, if
I was trained in zoology and marine zoology, and we
learned all of the Latin names of animals and birds,

(11:31):
so you're automatically when in the presence of a bird,
singing out the double barreled Latin name of it, as
if that tells you what you're looking at. It's actually
a delusion, it's actually a gate. I had to teach
myself when I went as a young naturalist to the
Galapagos Islands not to say the Latin name to myself.
To let the bird announce itself literally through its behavior,

(11:55):
through its song, through its presence, through its flight, you know,
to get another essence that lies beneath the name. So
we're constantly naming things in ways that allow us to
handle it, or I should say, allow our strategic minds
to handle it. Yeah, because we can be so terrified
by the fierceness of the world in our evolutionary past,

(12:19):
when we were gathered at night around the fire and
you listened out into the darkness and heard all of
these cries and trumpet calls. And I've had this experience
actually in today's world. In the African bush, you told
stories about what was out there, and the story helped
you to make sense of your fears and also of

(12:39):
your communal protections psychological protections. But it didn't mean to
say that your stories were true about what you were
hearing or what you were frightened of. And all of
our great traditions going back for hundreds of thousands of
years always say that the real ability to be present
in the world is through deep, prolonged, silent attention and

(13:05):
the ability to shape a deeply attentive identity that can
sustain that form of attention. Is how we come to
ground in this world and how we actually live in
the territory between what we call unhappiness and what we
only call happiness.

Speaker 3 (13:27):
I want to go back to something you said a
couple minutes ago about once we name something, we cease
to see it. I think Christian Murdy had that quote,
which is something like, you know, once the child learns
the name of the bird, they never see the bird again.
Pointing to what you're saying. And at the same time,
one of the things poetry does is it it's specificity

(13:48):
about what it's seeing. It's seeing a birch tree, not
a tree. Even the zen co on. You know, it's
not a tree in the courtyard. It's the oak tree
in the courtyard. So there is all Also at the
same time the concept and the name takes us away
from the thing. There are ways in times in which
the name brings us closer to the thing.

Speaker 1 (14:09):
Yes, Sir Emily Dickinson, said a word is dead when
it is said. Some say, but I say, it just
begins to live that day there's a poet speaking. I mean,
the task of poetry is to use language in a
way which grants life and is just as movable as
the thing that you're speaking of and all. It's why

(14:31):
you'll almost never see the word God in good poetry,
and if you do see the word God, it always
brings the poem to a halt. You have to use
language that opens up the physical quality itself and opens
up the silence behind that word and the kind of
gravitational pull of the world. I often talk about the

(14:54):
conversational nature of reality and the ability of a human
being to create a more conversational identity in that world.
But you could say that every conversation is based on
a mutual invitation. And we all know the way in
intimate relationships that the conversation stops when our invitations stop.
When you stop making an invitation to your partner in

(15:17):
a marriage or a relationship, almost always the conversation and
the relationship is coming to an end. So the invitation
we make is through our eyes, our ears, and then
our speech. So poetry is invitational speech in a way,
and it's joining the invitational nature of the world. The
world's constantly calling us out from any subscribed or circumscribed

(15:42):
perimeter that we've laid down for ourselves in the dust
around our feet. It's constantly calling us over the horizon
that we've arranged for ourselves. And it's one of the
reasons the world is so nourishing. It's one of the
reasons the world is so terrifying that the same time,
and our ability to submerge in screens and not be

(16:05):
physically present in the world is definitely one of the
ways we're hiding. And especially in North America, it's almost
become a cultural norm to walk into places where everyone
has their head down in screens. You know, where they
are controlling what they see, what they're listening to. In
many ways, and the wilder, more abandoned edges of the

(16:28):
world are kept at bay, where you don't have control
of who you meet, where the conversation leads you how
your physical body is behaving in the presence of other
physical bodies, so in and out of horizons. The conversational
nature of reality, the invitational nature of reality that will

(16:48):
never ever lead us alone, which which is why we
so often get anxious about the world. But anxiety is
one of the telling qualities that tell us we're supposed
to respond to a certain knock on our door in
a way other than the way we're responding to it now.

Speaker 3 (17:08):
So let's move on to anxiety. It's one of your essays,
and I was wondering if maybe you could just read
the first couple paragraphs of it.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
Yes, yeah, I was just revising this the other day. Actually,
so this is the latest version, or just a few
sentences changed, but crucial sentences. I think Anxiety is the
mask that truth wears when we refuse to stop and
uncover its face. Anxiety is the mask that truth wears

(17:40):
when we refuse to stop and uncover its face. The
disembodied state I feel when I pretend to put things
right by worrying about them instead of conversing with them.
The disembodied state I feel when I pretend to put
things right by worrying about them instead of conversing with them.

(18:02):
Anxiety is my ever present excuse for not truly resting
into the body, or the breath, or a world where
I might find out that truth. Anxiety is the temporary
helper going by the name of Werri, who, when turned
into our constant living companion, becomes our formidable jailer. In

(18:28):
the midst of anxiety, we always haunt the body like
an unhappy ghost from the past, instead of living in
it as a live anticipation of our future. Anxiety creates
the ghostlike sense of living timidly in our mortal frames,
so that we begin living in the world in the
same way as a troubled guest, a guest who does

(18:51):
not believe they deserve the rest and hospitality that the body,
the breath, or the world can offer. Anxiety is the
mind refusing to be consoled and nourished, either by the
body itself or by the beauty of the world that
this body inhabits. Anxiety is an extended state of denial,

(19:16):
the refusal to put right something that needs to be
put right, because putting it right often means feeling real anguish,
a real sense of the unknown, and the need to
change at a fundamental level. That's beautiful That laft line
is crucial about the refusal to feel real anguish. Anxiety

(19:38):
is often a limbo state where we refuse to actually
fall down into the grief that we're actually feeling. You know,
if you read back into our mythological past, or even
into the Bible, the King James Bible, you see people
are constantly falling down, weeping, our tearing their clothes. There

(20:01):
was an understanding that a full state of physical grief
is actually a form of enlightenment. We've all had that
experience where we lose someone close to us, you know,
that just breaks apart all of our defenses and we
break down weeping, And for many people that is the

(20:22):
nearest experience they will have to what it's called kensho
in the Zen experience of breakthrough of enlightenment. Actually, you're
on an edge. There's nowhere else to be in the world.
There's no further place to go. You're intimate with the loss,
You're intimate with your own physical body in the world.
You've given up your hopes for an easy explanation, and

(20:46):
you're just plunged into the sheer physical absence of the
person that you've lost. And there was a moment back
in the thirteenth century where the Great Dominichon mystic mister
Eckhart was asked by someone obviously in the state in
a state of grief because he said, where is God?
Where is God? And Ekat said, God is nowhere. God

(21:09):
is pure absence. The person he must have thought a
lot of the person he said this to, because it's
you know, it's asking a lot of the person to
whom he's speaking, So as probably someone who was a
student of of Ekat, that he'd be worthy of this description,
that he'd be up to and able for understanding God

(21:31):
in this way. That God is is the far horizon
of your yearning. It's where you're being pulled to out
of yourself. It's the greatest context you can imagine, and
you know even as you're imagining it that it will
lead you to places that you still cannot imagine.

Speaker 3 (22:07):
Back to anxiety. I think part of the problem with
anxiety is that I think it arises out of uncertainty.
Let's say I'm anxious about something. If that thing were
to actually occur, I have developed some degree of capability
of allowing myself to go into the grief, the heartache,
the pureness of all these things we're talking about. What

(22:28):
I found harder to do is when that loss is
looming and may or may not happen, And it seems
those are the really difficult things to set down, the
ones that could go either way.

Speaker 1 (22:43):
Yes, yes, so this is you know, the powerful physical
gift that deep silence gives you is to allow the
world to be itself and to announce as it goes
along what's actually occurring. Because we all know how many
of our anxieties will never actually come to pass, and
we all know the way that things we should be

(23:06):
anxious about will come to pass.

Speaker 3 (23:09):
Right, do we have no idea or even coming What we're.

Speaker 1 (23:14):
Worrying about is not what we should be worrying about.
And the ability to see to the center of the
pattern also strips away all of these necessities that the
surface that we think we need in order to be ourselves.
Silence always leads you to a radical kind of simplicity,
and so many of the things that you're defending on

(23:35):
the surface, you realize are ridiculous and part of some
absurd project that you decided are your ancestors decided to
hand down to you. You immediately eliminate a lot of
the things you're going to worry about just by paying
attention in deep silence and starting to shape an identity

(23:56):
that's in that deep silence.

Speaker 3 (23:58):
The horizons that you were talking about. I was actually
going to save that kind of end of the interview
because I think it is such a uplifting and hopeful
although there's fear embedded in it, but ultimately for me
it ends up being hopeful because this idea that there
is a horizon out there that I can't yet imagine

(24:20):
is really consoling to me, because I think what we
all tend to do is we have something that feels
important to us, and it's out there in the future,
and it's uncertain, and we want it to go a
certain way because all we can imagine, as far as
we are able to imagine, is how this thing we
want won't happen, and that's as far as we can see.

(24:43):
But a horizon says there is something beyond that.

Speaker 1 (24:46):
The definition of a horizon that you can't actually see
what's beyond it, but your imagination is drawn to it, yes,
and your physical body is drawn to it at the
same time. Where migratory creatures actually we came out of
Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, following horizon after horizon.
It was part of our ability to survive and be

(25:09):
in this world, actually, but it's also part of our joy,
the joy of beauty and of exploration. Often when we
lose our relationship to beauty, we also lose our relationship
to courage, which is really our heartfelt love of the

(25:29):
world and care for the world. And so there's another
paragraph here in the essay on anxiety. The way we
use it is a defense against beauty and against nourishment,
and against all the ways that the world is actually
giving to us, you know, through the blue of the sky,
the green of grass, you know, the wind across the mountainside.

(25:53):
Constant anxiety is an unconscious defense against what is calling
us to a deeper understanding. Ever present, anxiety actually covers
over and prevents me from feeling fully what is preying
on my mind or what is trying to be gifted
to me. Constant anxiety is our constant way of not
paying attention. Anxiety is a trembling surface identity that finds

(26:19):
the full measure of our anguish too painful to bear.
Constant fretting is our way of turning away from and
attempting to make a life free from the necessities of heartbreak.
Anxiety is our greatest defense against the vulnerabilities of intimacy
and a real understanding of others. Allowing our hearts to

(26:43):
actually break might be the first step in freeing ourselves
from anxiety. That's probably the most radical line I wrote
in the essay. Allowing our hearts to actually break might
be the first steping freeing ourselves from anxiety. There's another
saying here called care, the word care, and my favorite

(27:04):
line in that I say is care doesn't care if
you don't want to care. Human beings don't have a
choice about caring. They always care about something, yes, and
care is the measure of our heartfelt participation in the world.
And the only way you can stop caring is to

(27:26):
actually close yourself off from the world. So opening up
the path of care is also opening up the path
of heartbreak. There is no sincere path a human being
can take in this life without having their heart broken,
and yet we spend enormous amounts of energy trying to

(27:47):
find a path where we will not have that imaginative
organ broken open and displayed to the world.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
Right, I had something I was going to say and
it just zipped away.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
Okay, hotbreak of interviewing, you.

Speaker 3 (28:05):
Just redeemed that that's probably going to end up staying
in the interview. Now, Chris isn't going to cut it exactly. Yeah, anyway,
I'm going to move on because it's gone. But I'm
going to stay with anxiety for a second, and I'd
like to talk a little bit about what do we
do with this, because again I think sometimes yes, it's
a way of avoiding what we're actually feeling. And I

(28:27):
think in the other way, it's what we talked about.
It's this uncertainty and there is care in it because
we are seeing that this thing really matters to us
and we don't know what's going to happen with it,
which is I think what causes the anxiety. And you
say that anxiety is difficult to shed because it always

(28:48):
refuses to rest, and rest is where the answer to
anxiety lies.

Speaker 1 (28:54):
Yes, and actually rest lies under our anxiety. The very
thing you're being anxious about is the very thing you're
meant to converse with in a different way than your
anxiety is allowing you to speak.

Speaker 3 (29:09):
That's a beautiful.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
Anxiety is both my protection and the sure indication of
my deepest vulnerabilities, all at the same time. What seems
completely wrong with my life, with the world and with
the time in which I live is often my greatest
manufactured defense against being fully part of this world, this body,
and this time. What I worry about and fret about

(29:34):
for my children's future is often what keeps me from
helping them into that future. What I worry about and
what I am anxious about keeps me in an insulated,
busy state of mind that stops me feeling the true
depth and vulnerability of how much I care, how much
I want to make a difference, and how much I

(29:56):
feel powerless to do it. So underneath anxiety lies this
deep well of care. I care about something, but I'm
afraid of caring to the debt to which it's calling me,
because it calls for a kind of physical vulnerability in
the world that probably my parents, or my schooling on

(30:17):
my society did not initiate me into. So I need help.
You know, you can get it from the poetic tradition,
from our great contemplative traditions that talk about the vulnerabilities.
You know. We tend to think of Zen, for instance,
and I've got an essay on Zen. We tend to
think of it as this beautiful, clear state, and it's

(30:37):
all about polished flaws and bronze bells and the clarity
of sitting in silence, very organized. But really the path
of zen is the invitation to heartbreak, and all of
the zen coins are often about physical breakdown, about not
understanding something because you can't stand being so fully invited

(31:01):
so physically into the world, and the breaking apart into
tears are a great shout. Are the moon reflected in
the surface of the water in the bucket, the bucket
breaks open, the water runs out, you know, And then
it says, and then the monk is enlightened, and you
don't realize the physical experience or breakdown that the said

(31:24):
monk went through at that time.

Speaker 3 (31:25):
Yeah, it's always monks. So and so stubbed his toe,
hit his head, was struck by lightning, was locked in
a tomb. There's always something like that, to your point,
which causes this breakthrough. I want to pause for a
quick good wolf reminder. This one's about a habit change
and a mistake I see people making. And that's really

(31:46):
that we don't think about these new habits that we
want to add in the context of our entire life.

Speaker 2 (31:52):
Right.

Speaker 3 (31:52):
Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit
in the life that we have. So when we just
keep adding I should do this, I should do that,
I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't
really thought about what we're not going to do in
order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for
you to think about where is this going to fit
and what in my life might I need to remove.

(32:14):
If you want to step by step guide for how
you can easily build new habits that feed your good Wolf,
go to good Wolf dot me, slash change and join
the free masterclass. Let's move on to a couple of
the other things. There's so many that I want to
talk about, and the book is amazing in that way.
I don't know how many you wrote, but there's a lot.
I ended up choosing like twenty five, and then I

(32:36):
had to edit way down from there, so I want
to make sure we get a little bit of a tour.

Speaker 1 (32:41):
The number is important, actually because with a part of
the story, I began very naturally writing these essays, and
I created a reader's circle and did twenty four people
signed up for it, and I did twenty four one
every two weeks for people, and that got me writing,
and then I did another twenty and then I said, oh,
I have a book, and then I added a few more,

(33:03):
and lo and behold, it came out with fifty two
essays in the first book, and all of the reviewers said, oh,
a pack of cards or one for each week of
the year. But it was just sheer luck that I
put fifty two out, And so I decided to do
fifty two again in the second one, just because the
number had been so talismanic, so luckily talismanic for the

(33:25):
first one. And I actually wrote sixty five essays in
seven months last year and a kind of delirium, and
it was a delirium, actually, and then I chose fifty
two out of the sixty five to put out in
the book.

Speaker 3 (33:37):
I think that's very interesting because one of the things
that I noticed in beginning to read the book, and
this is this is a feature of our modern life,
right that we're going so fast, is that at first
reading of some of the essays, you know, I'm talking
about the first hour in the book or so, I'm
feeling impatient because I'm like, this is beautiful, but it's

(34:00):
the bottom line, you know. David laid out for me
what's the bottom line, and as I had a little
bit more time with it and I began to slow down,
then they start working on a completely different level. And
so I think a week is actually an interesting amount
of time to think about spending with one of these.

Speaker 1 (34:18):
That's well said, Eric, because you're not meant to start
this book and read it all the way through and
it would probably kill you in the way it killed
me to write it. Yet you did that. Yeah, you're
meant to take one essay and spend a few days
with it, actually, and they're short enough that you can
return to them. And yes, exactly, the physical experience itself,

(34:41):
it's like portray. You can't speed read portray. Poetry itself
actually engages you to slow down to the same physical
experience in which it was actually written.

Speaker 3 (34:50):
Yes, there's an old Chinese line something like read a
book for the thousandth time and the truth will emerge.
And when I started studying with a Zen teacher really serious.
I remember he was like, Okay, here's the book to read,
and it was I think it was Appreciate your Life
by my Zuomiro. She doesn't it doesn't really matter. But
what I noticed was I was told and encouraged to

(35:13):
read that book in a totally different way. This is
in the last decade since I had this podcast, and
as part of having this podcast, I'm reading a lot, right,
because I'm trying to honor every guest by reading their things.
I'm trying to understand the material. So it's the way
I show love to the guests to the audience, right.
But it's fast, and I suddenly realized when I was
doing this reading for my zen practice, I was reading

(35:35):
a book that I could have read in an afternoon
for six months. Yes, and your essays, I think provoke
a similar thing. There's a lot of facets. As you
turn the diamond around, you know, the diamond being the word, right,
There's so many facets. And of course there's that thing
that happens when we read, which is that if we
truly are engaging, we are not the same person that

(35:59):
we were the first time we read it.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
Yes, exactly. I mean the essays are written in a
poetic fashion, and in poetry you only need one line. Actually,
they are like coins. In my essay on Despair in
the first book, the only line you need from that
essay is despair takes us in when we have nowhere
else to go. Despair takes us in when we have
nowhere else to go. Everything's in that line, you know,

(36:23):
the shelter that's in despair, the invitation to give up.
It's a temporary form of giving up, where we pretend
we can't go on in a sense, in order to
go down to another layer of ground. And so, yes,
prolonged attention. You're much better reading one line and staying
with that for a good few hours or one paragraph.

(36:45):
Then you are running through the whole book, you know,
so quickly. So as you know, Eric, we have our
educational systems commoditize learning, and I think actually one of
the bright sides of what's also going to have a
big shadow, you know, with artificial intelligence, is that we're
no longer going to be able to test people on

(37:07):
rote learning. Right. It's going to free us up. We're
going to have to reimagine what learning and testing what
learning means. We're going to have to go back to
more of a you know, the ancient oral inheritance of
testing presence, yes, and testing understanding at a deep level.

Speaker 3 (37:26):
What you say about only needing one line, It's funny
when I listen to you read, there are so many
lines that could be the line that I expect that's
the end, right, Like you just hit it with the
line that ends up and then it goes on. And
I say that as a compliment, not as a negative thing, right,
because each of these lines is good enough that it

(37:48):
could be an ending and you'd have so much to
ponder and reflect upon. Let's move into another essay. I
am going to skip by for now too that I
really want to talk about guilt and shame because it's
really important, right, those are really big things. But I
feel like I want to hit one that just was
the one that I most was like, huh that I

(38:11):
didn't see coming. And it's about nagging. Yes, you say
nagging is love? Unlistened to from both sides, say more
about nagging. I found it a really beautiful essay and surprising.

Speaker 1 (38:25):
Well, thank you. There's a number of essays that are
begun tongue in cheek. The one now insay now where
I say now is not what it was. Then it
goes into more serious territory. And I just wanted to
choose something that we all have to work with in relationship.
And I thought, have I ever come across a long

(38:48):
term relationship where nagging doesn't occur, you know, either in
your own life or witnessing other marriages, and I realized
what an emblem of care it is actually. And if
you're in a relationship where you're never nagged, you do
have to ask yourself if the person really cares about you.

(39:08):
I mean, we know all the evidence of the way
that in relationship, especially for men, you're going to live
longer being in relationship, most especially with a woman who's
actually asking you if you're taking care of yourself in
the right way. And men live so much longer in relationship.
Unfortunately women don't, so they need to kind of help.

(39:30):
But nagging is love and listened to from both sides,
the helpless nagger and the equally helpless naggee. Nagging is
something both sides want to turn away from, something both
sides would rather not experience, but something that is also
an abiding and ancient necessity in every long term relationship.

(39:54):
Love meets powerlessness. Love meets powerlessness is our way of
knocking on a door when those living inside most need
our help but refuse it, or when we ourselves neglect
to gain and again to ask for the necessary help.
Nagging is necessary in every committed human relationship because nagging

(40:20):
is the way love tries to survive when it feels
it has no other way.

Speaker 3 (40:26):
Yeah, the two lines there for me are when love
meets powerlessness and then the last one. Nagging is the
way love tries to survive when it has no other way.

Speaker 1 (40:37):
And yes, I.

Speaker 3 (40:38):
Love it because it goes back to these things that
we see as negative point towards what we truly care
about in what matters, and nagging is just another example
of that. It is there's something that I want, There's
something deeper I want here in this relationship, and I'm
not getting it, and it's partially why nagging. Often the

(40:59):
relationship advice is like, look underneath the thing. It's not
about the thing. It's not about the trash being taken
out or not being taken out. It's not about It's
usually about something far deeper, which gets to another essay
that you've alluded to, which is care. We're feeling uncared for,
so we're nagging as an attempt because it's the way

(41:21):
we're trying to keep love alive when it feels it
has no other way. Just such a beautiful idea.

Speaker 1 (41:26):
Yes, it can also be proactively helpful in a way
that can help a person who's refusing to get diagnosed
far some kind of pain they have in their body.
They're just trying to soldier on in the most especially
in the masculine psyche, and the necessity to keep knocking
on that door and to find different ways of faghing

(41:46):
it until it's heard.

Speaker 3 (42:08):
I think that's so tricky to figure out. I'll give
you an example. I've got a friend, yes, and her
husband is taking terrible care of himself, right, high blood pressure,
you know, high cholesterol, way overweight, eating terribly, not exercising,
and his father went in his fifties from heart disease
and he is now in his forties and they have

(42:30):
young children. So she is really flummoxed by this and
frustrated by it, right because she doesn't want her kids
or herself to be left without their partner in potentially
five to ten years. And so I think what you
come up against here is this also love meets powerlessness,

(42:50):
Like what can you do that doesn't destroy the relationship
by trying to get somebody to do something they don't
currently want to do?

Speaker 1 (42:59):
Yes, I mean it's the invitation on both sides is
on the one side to say it in a way
in which there are no defenses against what you're saying
and on the person who's being asked. It's listening at
another level, yes, But sometimes in order for that listening
to occur, you literally have to get down on your knees.

(43:21):
You can't just keep saying it as a logistical invitation,
get to the doctor, Get to the doctor. It may
actually necessitate you, as the nagger, going to another level
of intimacy, literally getting down on your knees in tears
and saying why it's so important to you. You know,

(43:43):
if that doesn't work, it may be that the relationship
is coming to an end. There are certain points, you know,
where you try sincerely metaphorically and mythologically three times and
if it's not received, then you're meant to hold a
different conversation with that. But you won't find out until
you follow what looks like nagging on the surface to

(44:05):
its foundation in a real invitational conversation that displays your
vulnerability in why you're asking this.

Speaker 3 (44:14):
And I think it gets to a really challenging thing,
which is what are we willing to or able to
live with in a relationship and what is our relationship
with ourselves, about the trade offs that life inevitably involves. Yes,
I'd like that to be your next book. Take the
serenity prayer and write an entire book about how the

(44:37):
wisdom to know the difference in lots of really naughty situations.
Why don't you tackle that one next, Eric, that's your
next book? Actually, I honestly think it might be. I
really sort of jokingly but not because that idea of well,
you just accept the things you can't change and you
change the things you can is lovely on the surface,

(44:58):
but boy, it's complicated because we don't know, right, you
don't know? Am I one more asked from the person changing?

Speaker 1 (45:06):
Well, you know, there's another level to this is the
way we nag ourselves. We nag ourselves in unproductive ways.
Nagging is you know, you will often say to yourself
in the mirror, oh my god, you know, you need
to lose some weight, you know, But it's really underneath
that the need to be lithe to be young, to
be healthy in the world, you know, and the ability

(45:27):
to actually talk to yourself in the mirror in a
way in which you would want to listen to yourself
is a whole discipline in and of itself. If you
talked to your friends the way you talk to yourself
in the mirror, you'd never have another friend in your life. Actually, right, So,
the ability to have compassion for yourself, you could say
that's a practice of deepening the conversation, deepening what looks

(45:51):
on the surface like nagging. Yeah, The conclusion of the
micro essay on nagging is nagging is that heavily disguised beautiful,
but listen to invitation to a better life. We all
want to receive. Nagging is that heavily disguised beautiful but
unlistened to invitation to a better life we all want

(46:12):
to receive, always despite ourselves and always, always, always, always,
despite the other person trying to be brought out of
the place where it is presently hiding. Nagging is love
just love unlistened to from both sides.

Speaker 3 (46:30):
That point you made about we're nagged quite often because
we're not really listening right to our conscience, to what
is good for our health, to the courageous beckoning path
we refuse again and again to take. And I think
that's what's so interesting. Is also points to a lot
about what you talk about in the essay on guilt, right,
which is we tend to think we should move away

(46:51):
from it, but it could be enormously instructive. So that
nagging voice inside of us, I think calls upon us
to have some degree of discernment about is it nagging
us unnecessarily and in unkind and habitual ways like you
just described, or is it nagging me because there's a
deeper call that I'm not answering, And like many things,

(47:13):
that's difficult to figure out. But one of the things
that you've said multiple times, and I've heard you say
it before, but I don't think it landed for me
in the same way that it did today, is that
it's about the conversations that we have with these things
and going to a deeper level of conversation with them
than we normally do. That seems to be an underlying

(47:35):
theme of what you're pointing us to in all of these.

Speaker 1 (47:39):
Yes, And we can tend to think of conversation as
just some kind of verbal exchange, you know, but the
Latin roots the etymology of conversation lead us to its
original meaning, which is inside out. Actually converse means inside out,
and you're literally meant to bring the inside to the outside.

(47:59):
That's the true invitation in every conversation. We all know
the satisfaction when we have an exchange, and they're rare,
although you can make them less rare through practicing deeper conversations.
We all know the pleasure and satisfaction we get when
we certainly say something we didn't realize we knew, and

(48:22):
that we suddenly say something together. I mean, I'm having
that experience with you, Eric in this interview where we're
saying things about things I've written here which I'd never
quite said before. That's incredibly satisfying. It's bringing the inside
of an experience out into the world again. Yes, and
the essays themselves are meant to do that, but it's

(48:43):
interesting to try and think of more than interesting, to
think of conversation as a physical experience of bringing the
insight to the outside, not just what's hidden verbally, but
the physical experience that's hidden under the words out into
the world.

Speaker 3 (49:01):
That's beautifully said, let's lighten things up here quite literally,
because you say that humor is a disguised form of
spiritual discipline. I've often called it a spiritual virtue. Levity
is a spiritual virtue. Talk to me about how humor
is a disguised form of a spiritual discipline.

Speaker 1 (49:20):
Humor tells us that whatever context we've arranged for ourselves
in our minds or in our religious beliefs, there's always
another context that makes your context absurd. And just understanding
that from the get go gives you a real sense

(49:40):
of humor, a real ability to live at many different
levels at once. And you know, humor is really big
in the Irish culture, and it's big because it fits
with the Irish understanding that whatever you say always has
another context that contradicts it, And every conversation in the

(50:03):
West environment is actually based on this dynamic, every real conversation,
you tried to subvert the original basis on which the
conversation started, and then everyone's really happy and you can
go on to the next subject. Actually, I'm serious about humor,
serious about humor as the understanding. Now, however you've described yourself,

(50:25):
it will not survive meeting with reality. I had this
experience many years ago up in Himalayas of almost dying
from amoebic dysentery. I was hallucinating for three days and
three nights actually in a yak manger at ten thousand
feet in this outside where this family were keeping me alive. Actually,
and the culminating experience after three days was sitting up

(50:48):
covered in dried yack, dung and straw, just laughing outrageously.
The whole family ran out actually to see what was happening.
And my experience was that this whole David White project
was totally absurd. Yeah, yeah, And I had this name,

(51:09):
I had this idea about myself, and it was just
absolutely ridiculous, and I was literally raving sitting up. But
it was a real powerful breakthrough that stayed with me
after I came out of the hallucination. And beneath me
was this river in the valley, the High Valley that
came out of the slopes of dew Lagiary, and I realized,

(51:31):
looking at the river, we'd given a name to that river,
the Marcy Andi River Valley, but actually you were naming
something that was already gone. And you might as well
try to understand a human being, you know, through this
essential movement through the world, through the way they hold
a conversation of life, rather than through any static nomenclature.

(51:56):
We often will try to dismiss a person by labeling them.
You see it in the adolescent behavior emanating from the
White House at the moment, you know, naming, nicknaming people,
giving people names that make them small in the eyes
of the world, that embarrass them. You know, you know,

(52:16):
this is the way that we behave as adolescents in
trying to keep the world at bay and trying to
keep other adolescents at bay. We want a more mature
experience of the world. We stop naming people too early
in the process, you know, we stop calling out wife, wife,
our husband, husband, our partner, partner. We start releasing them

(52:38):
from the names we've given them. You're good at this,
you're bad at that. You know it's your fault, it's
my fault. And you start to let the words emanate
from another more movable, more conversational, more invitational, more vulnerable,
robustly vulnerable, where vulnerability is not a weakness but a

(53:02):
strength place And it's actually not a place, it's more
of a waveform or it's a tide. It's the sea
that lies beneath you and between you and the world.
I have a whole book of love what you called
the sea in you actually, and it's the ability to
stay in love with a person by actually feeling that

(53:27):
tidal give and take inside them. They don't even know
who they are, So how could you give them a
name right and say you know who they are? They're
just finding out who they are. We give names to
our son, our daughter and about who they are, but
they're often out in the world trying to find that
out themselves. So how could you, even as a father

(53:48):
or a mother, name fully the child that you brought
into the world.

Speaker 3 (53:53):
Actually, and as soon as you name it, it's something else, right,
I mean, that's the Taoist view of reality and comes
out of Taoism, which is that life is all process,
it's all e vent it's all relation. These things that
we are giving nouns, they aren't that way really at all.
And the same thing happens if you dig deep down

(54:14):
into the fundamental level of reality right now, if you
get down into quantum physics, you find things aren't things
in the way we think they are.

Speaker 1 (54:23):
Yeah, there are great lines in a love poem by
Pablo Rude says, when the rice withdraws from the earth
the grains of its flower, when the wheat hardens its
little hip joints and lifts its face of a thousand hens.
I make my way to the grove where the woman
and the man embrace, to touch the innumerable sea of

(54:45):
what continues. El Marable de loca continua to touch the
innumerable sea of what continues. So we're afraid of what continues,
because what continue may take the other person away from us.
And that's the risk we take in loving fully. It's

(55:07):
always the full measure of your ability to give the
other person away to the world, and most of the
time they come back to us. But there may be
a tide that takes them away from us completely. And
that's what we're afraid of. Is is the change in
the world that will break your heart. So the ability
to understand that heartbreak is part of your sincere dedication

(55:32):
to the other actually and the sincere dedication to our
world at the same time.

Speaker 3 (55:39):
So listener in thinking about that and all the other
great wisdom from today's episode. If you were going to
isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what
would it be. Remember, little by little, a little becomes
a lot. Change happens by us repeatedly taking positive action.
And I want to give you a tip on that,
and it's just start small really important when we're trying

(56:01):
to implement new habits to often start smaller than we
think we need to, because what that does is it
allows us to get victories. And victories are really important
because we become more motivated when we're feeling good about ourselves,
and we become less motivated when we're feeling bad about ourselves.
So by starting small and making sure that you succeed,

(56:21):
you build your motivation for further change down the road.
If you'd like a step by step guide for how
you can easily build new habits that feed your good Wolf,
go to good Wolf dot me slash change and join
the free masterclass. I think that is a beautiful place
for us to wrap up. You and I are going
to talk for a couple more minutes. In the post
show conversation. We may get into shame and guilt, we

(56:45):
might get into injury. There's so many good ones unordinary listeners.
If you'd like access to that post show conversation and
all the other post show conversations, ad free episodes, a
special episode I do just for you each week, you
can go to one you fee net slash join and
become part of our community and help support this show. David,

(57:05):
thank you so much. It is always a pleasure to
talk with you. I feel like I could do it
for hours.

Speaker 1 (57:10):
Thank you, Thank you Eric. That passed very quickly, always
a good sign next experience of the timeless in the conversation,
So thank you too.

Speaker 3 (57:18):
Thank you so much for listening to the show. If
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(57:39):
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