Stand Still in Silence.

What you do when you feel lost in the Placeholder

Recently I ran into this amazing interview clip of David Whyte on Thinking Allowed. One of the books that helped me navigate my “Placeholder” period was The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship by David Whyte. The book was great to contemplate my commitments to work, relationship and my life.

In this interview, David Whyte talks about people dying on their feet in the Corporate America and their desperate longing for more satisfying and real work that makes them come alive. Instead of “how to find more meaningful work,” he recites poems to his audiences in the corporates so they can experience a way out, starting with The Divine Comedy by Dante.

“In the middle of the journey of my life

I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.”

— Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno — Purgatorio — Paradiso

I had such a moment sometime in 2016. I called this The Moment of Truth in my book The Placeholder. The next natural question was “How do I find my way back?” But once I got back on the track I was on before, I felt lost again. It meant that wasn’t the right path to be on. I had to look for a new path. Or create one for myself. This was even more confusing. So, how do you know that you are on your path?

David Whyte says: “Because it disappears.” That’s how you know. How do you know that you’re really doing something radical? Because you can’t see where you’re going. That’s how you know.

But everything you have lent on for your identity has gone. So you are going to enter the black contemplative splendors of self-doubt at the same time as you’re setting out on this radical new path. That first stage of entering the dark wood — that was the beginning of the Placeholder for me.

Then David Whyte leads us with another marvelous poem, Lost by David Wagoner who used to be a chair of poetry at the University of Washington. It’s based on a teaching story from the Northwest Native American tradition. This teaching was given to a young person who would ask the question “What do I do when I’m lost in the forest?” Here’s the answer that the elder gives.

Lost (by David Wagoner)

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

In David Whyte’s words,

the elder is teaching that you cannot sleepwalk your way into your destiny. You must wake up and pay attention. Stand still. You know the trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost. You must pay attention. That means paying attention to the shadow of your existence, too. You must pay attention to everything you’ve given away in order to make yourself safe in your position at work. All the games you play in order to remain safe and untouched, as well as your creative gifts, too. You must pay attention to those.

Entering the Placeholder required a lot of attention. It was like being an anthropologist, observing attentively everything that was happening inside and outside of myself. I wouldn’t call it a destiny for what I was trying to create in my Placeholder period. Yet it was something more fundamentally meaningful and deeply aligned with my values. To understand what truly mattered to me, I had to pay attention. Paying attention required a lot of mental and physical stillness.

Another teaching in this poem is silence, according to David Whyte:

The second stage is that in this teaching, there is this incredible feeling of silence. I think what the elder is saying is that, unless you have an ability for silence in your body to do that, you will get too frightened. Because all the voices inside you will drown out any real change. You’ll have hundred reasons not to do to make any real change you long for. And you’ve got all the voices and all the reasons not to do it. And so the ability for profound silence is being called on here. And then that attention can flower into something else.

Leonard Cohen, the singer who turned Zen monk, spoke of stillness and silence in a matter-of-fact manner that it was simply the most practical way he’d found of working through the confusion and terror that had long been his bedfellows. I had to face a cacophony of so many messages coming at me as I tried different ideas and experimenting them; “You should’t do that — it’s not helping your career!” “What about that job at Google? That should be a good change!” It was so easy to miss the real signal from within, surrounded by all those noises from outside.

I desperately needed stillness and silence. Yet it wasn’t about finding a quiet place where I can just be still. I had to build an internal and external systems to create the sense of stillness and silence. Internally, it meant more time in meditation and learning Dharma for me. Externally, it was about finding the right community of people who are like-minded or inspiring for what I was trying to create. This process of building the system of stillness and silence became a foundation for my own resilience.

In the Placeholder, I left my deadening corporate job and created my own Noble Work to help teams and organizations build healthy work culture. It’s so fulfilling and meaningful to me, yet it doesn’t mean there are no problems. The biggest difference now, though, is that I don’t feel depleted or burned out because of those problems. Whenever I encounter those moments of problems, I find my own tools of standing still in silence. There may be problems, but there are no difficulties.

Question: What is your version of standing still in silence?

Watch the Excerpt of the Interview of David Whyte below.