David Whyte has a beautiful poem entitled, Santiago (you can find the poem reprinted with the author’s permission here).
Santiago uses a winding, twisting, unpredictable road as the metaphor for our life’s journey. The road traverses hills and valleys: sometimes the road rises up to catch you, “when you thought you would fall;” at other times, the road seems to drop from under your feet, “as if leaving you to walk on thin air.”
Staying on the road and trusting that it is leading somewhere for our benefit is the whole point – much more so than anything we might accomplish or anything we might acquire. At some point, each of us learns that…
“…you were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way
than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach:
as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city with golden towers, and cheering crowds…”
The journey’s deeper meaning is bound up directly in its twists and turns, which give one “the sense of having walked from far inside yourself” along a path that, had you known how it would unfold and where it might lead, you might never have taken.
The poem holds out the promise that, in a flash, we will see and finally understand that the road – the journey itself, with all its unforeseeable twists and turns and precisely as a road with unforeseeable twists and turns – is the destination. In fact, whenever we feel that we’ve arrived, we learn that there’s still more to come. The poem concludes with an important reminder:
“…and turning the corner at what you thought was the end of the road, you found just a simple reflection, and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse: like a person and a place you had sought forever, like a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond; like another life, and the road still stretching on.”
One final thought.
I had the privilege of listening to David Whyte read this poem as part of an online webinar I attended during the pandemic. When he finished, he asked us to consider the following:
“Wouldn’t it be great to have the same mercy about your own life? Instead of trying to be this Olympic, gold medal-winning spiritual athlete who knows where they are going all the time, that you could actually appreciate the beauty of your life disappearing for a while and not knowing exactly where it’s going to reappear again, and actually how gorgeous that is. And that if you knew where it was going to appear, you might not actually follow the path. Now there’s a mercy to things being hidden from you until you’re actually ready for them.”
David’s challenge hit me right between the eyes. For years, my own dissatisfaction with not knowing exactly where my road was supposed to lead or when I would finally get to the “gilded roofs” and the “cheering crowds” made me my own worst enemy. When David posed his question to us, I finally began – ever so slowly – to accept that I do not need to know precisely where all the turns in the road are going to be, and that I can even allow the road to fall away from time to time.
How about you?
Are you willing to accept that you are “more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach?”
Is it possible for you to appreciate the beauty of your life “disappearing for a while and not knowing exactly where it’s going to reappear again?”
If the answer to either of these questions is “yes,” and having an experienced guide to help you navigate the road ahead, let’s talk.
Please click here to set up a no-obligation conversation.
Chris Kenny, The 3 Life Questions™
