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.
To live in such a hospitable way brings many challenges. In marriage or with a life’s partner, it demands trust and flexibility in the commitment. Many relationships die quietly soon after the initial commitment. They lose their passion and adventure. The relationship becomes an arrangement. This often happens because the couple renege on a plurality of other friendships as central to their lives. Even though you have one anam-cara, one to whom you are committed, one who reaches you where no one else can or will, this person cannot become the absolute mirror for your life. To expect any one individual to satisfy your life-longing is a completely unjust demand. No one could live up to that expectation. The self is not singular. There are many selves within the one individual. Different friends awaken and reach different selves within you. Different gifts and different challenges come through your different friendships. To hold the borders of your commitment open allows you to give and receive from others without necessarily endangering the sacredness of your anam-cara bond. In fact, it can enrich and deepen the primordial and permanent intimacy between you. To live with this porousness can at times lead to ambivalence, but with discernment and integrity that need not become destructive. This art of living is vital in the workplace. This porousness often allows the alternative light to come through so that you do not have a blind faith in the system. You can still work committedly and creatively and yet recognize the surrounding functionalism and refrain from giving yourself totally and making yourself permanently vulnerable.
When you choose someone or some way of life, you invest your heart. Choice becomes an invitation to commitment. When you commit, you deepen presence. Though your choice narrows the range of possibility now open to you, it increases the intensity of the chosen possibility. New dimensions of the chosen path reveal themselves; a new path opens inwards to depth and outwards to new horizons. Your choice has freed your longing from dispersing itself over a whole range of surface. When we avoid choice we often become victims of distraction. We flit like the butterfly from one flower to the next, delightfully seduced by its perfume and colour. We remain secretly addicted to the temporary satisfaction and pleasure of immediacy. Kierkegaard divided the life-journey into stages, and he saw that the aesthetic stage was the wanderer whose longing is magnetized on the endless array of novelties. We celebrate the surface unwilling to become acquainted with the depths where the darkness plies its slow and patient transfigurations. The colour and excitement of the surface, though delightful, are ultimately deceptive; they keep us from recognizing the habit of our repetitions and the boredom and poverty that sleep there. When we choose a definite path or partner, we leave the endless array of beckoning surface. We go below the façade of repetition and risk the danger of encounter, challenge, and responsibility. When you choose with discernment, integrity, and passion, you submit yourself to the slow and unglamorous miracle of change.
