Great Choices Need the Shelter of Blessing

Such moments of choosing are also moments of great vulnerability. Often, there seems to be a dark side to destiny; it gathers to conspire against the freshly formed choice or chosen direction. The act of making a profound choice lifts one out of the level shelter of the crowd. There is the Daoist saying “The wind in the forest always hits the tallest trees.” A choice creates clearance. In this new space, the unknown has clear sights on the individual. No obstacles blur the target. Literary tragedy offers a profound exploration of this vulnerability. With passion, the tragic hero makes a choice. Unknown to him, he stumbles against some divine law. The choice that opened the glimpse of a wonderful journey and possibility squeezes and tightens now like a noose around the protagonist’s neck. The terrible consequences of the passionately chosen path begin to collapse underneath the hero and destroy him and his world. The transfiguration in tragedy is the hero’s recognition of the secret order that he unintentionally violated.

When the garden of your unchosen lives has enough space to breathe beneath your chosen path, your life enjoys a vitality and a sense of creative tension. Rilke refers to this as “the repository of unlived things.” You know that you have not compromised the immensity that you carry, and in which you participate. You have not avoided the call of commitment; yet you hold your loyalty to your chosen path in such a way as to be true to the blessings and dangers of life’s passionate sacramentality. No life is single. Around and beneath each life is the living presence of these adjacencies. Often, it is not the fact of our choosing that is vital, but rather the way we hold that choice. In so far as we can, we should ensure that our chosen path is not a flight from complexity. If we opt for complacency, we exclude ourselves from the adventure of being human. Where all danger is neutralized, nothing can ever grow. To keep the borders of choice porous demands critical vigilance and affective hospitality. To live in such a way invites risk and engages complexity. Life cannot be neatly compartmentalized. Once the psyche is engaged with such invitation and courage, it is no longer possible to practise tidy psychological housekeeping. To keep one’s views and convictions permeable is to risk the intake of new possibility, which can lead to awkward change. Yet the integrity of growth demands such courage and vulnerability from us; otherwise the tissues of our sensibility atrophy and we become trapped behind the same predictable mask of behaviour.