I’ve been meaning to write about David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea for a while and couldn’t quite figure out how to write something that would do it justice. So I decided to take the quotes that resonated most with me and organize them by theme. The thing I loved about this book was that it brought alive many of the common phases I’ve seen people go through on their own pathless paths, but with a lot more poetic flair.
The book is probably my favorite of Whyte’s. It explores his own personal journey shifting from being a naturalist in the Galapagos to working in a non-profit to quitting without much of a plan to become a poet in his 30s. It was the only narrative Whyte book I hadn’t read, and I put it off for a while because I knew I’d thoroughly enjoy it. I read it in Portugal, which made it even better.
Here are 11 themes that resonated with me.
1. Work can provide safety
Work provides safety. To define work in other ways than safety is to risk our illusions of immunity in the one organized area of life where we seem to keep nature and the world at bay.
2. On “good work”
All of our great artistic and religious traditions take equally great pains to inform us that we must never mistake a good career for good work.
To have a firm persuasion in our work—to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at exactly the same time—is one of the great triumphs of human existence.
3. How work nudges us to avoid the call
A work emboldens us for a while, and then, if we do not invigorate and reimagine our participation, it begins to enclose us and slowly starve our spirit.
4. There is more to the world
Young as I was in Galapagos, I began to touch an exposed nerve in human experience: the sense that there is something larger in the world than mere human priorities.
5. On being lost and midlife
The essence of midlife crisis is that something has to change but the person feels he no longer has the body, the will, or the energy to do it anymore.
6. Refusal of the call
Poetry tugged and beckoned to me to move in its direction, but I hadn’t the faith for the final step of making myself visible. How was I to make a living from it, for God’s sake?
7. Following what matters and taking action
I decided on two things: firstly, I was going to do at least one thing every day toward my future life as a poet… One thing a day adds up to a great deal over time. One thing a day is a powerful multiplier.
8. Stepping into the unknown
I had an intuition that when you really annunciate what you want in the world you will always be greeted, in the first place, with some species of silence.
9. Dealing with pressure from others
One of the distinguishing features of any courageous human being is the ability to remain unutterably themselves in the midst of conforming pressures. The surprising realization is that our friends can try to make us conform as much as our worst enemies.
10. On arrival
Once we cross the frontier from desire to actual fulfillment, we find that in order to inhabit the new world we have to slough off the identity that was so necessary to us as a seeker.
11. On the cycles of life
Good work and good education are achieved by visitation and then absence, appearance and disappearance.
Whyte is my favorite writer, and this book is a beautiful reflection on his own journey and on the inner game of doing the thing that scares you (people thought he was crazy to quit his day job) and living full out.
If you liked these quotes, you might like the thread I did on the twelve phases of the pathless path, which this book partially inspired.