The Call to Live Everything, Episode 84
We are so often afraid of our own aliveness that we’ll cover it up with an image, a role, or an identity that’s been handed to us by others. But what possibilities for encounter with life and with one another are born when we cross the thin divide between ‘image’ and ‘realness’? A conversation about not turning away with Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.
Here’s Episode 84 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living.
Our source this week is by John O’Donohue:
The Call to Live Everything
One of the most amazing recognitions of the human mind is that time passes. Everything that we experience somehow passes into a past invisible place: when you think of yesterday and the things that were troubling you and worrying you, and the intentions that you had and the people that you met, and you know you experienced them all, but when you look for them now, they are nowhere — they have vanished… It seems to me that our times are very concerned with experience, and that nowadays to hold a belief, to have a value, must be woven through the loom of one’s own experience, and that experience is the touchstone of integrity, verification and authenticity. And yet the destiny of every experience is that it will disappear.
One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them. This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts.
John O’Donohue
Excerpt from WALKING ON THE PASTURES OF WONDER
John O’Donohue in conversation with John Quinn
Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash