Life at the frontier: the conversational nature of reality | David Whyte | TEDxPugetSound

Internationally acclaimed poet David Whyte encourages us to remain open to the dialogues we have, the conversations we have, with our surroundings and ourselves that inform and inspire our ideas.

Poet David Whyte is an Associate Fellow at Templeton College and Said Business School at the University of Oxford. He works with many European, American and international companies, using poetry and thoughtful commentary to illustrate how we can foster qualities of courage and engagement.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx.

Alison Whitmire:
I first heard about David Whyte

six years ago when I started working
with a CEO organization called Vistage.

David Whyte's poetry is quite literally
part of the training curriculum

for Vistage Group chairs.

His work, his poetry, is so evocative

that it is what we use

to help connect leaders
with a hidden part of themselves,

with an unclaimed part of themselves.

And so David is here today
quite literally to open us up.

So without further ado, David Whyte

and his talk, "Life at the frontier
and the conversational nature of reality."

(Applause)

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone.

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone.

As if life were a progressive
and cunning crime

with no witness to the tiny
hidden transgressions,

as if life were a progressive
and cunning crime

with no witness to the tiny
hidden transgressions.

To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings.

Surely, even you, at times,
have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus,

crowding our your solo voice.

You must note the way
the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you courage.

Alertness is the hidden
discipline of familiarity.

Alertness is the hidden
discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor
of things to come,

the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,

and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness

and ease into the conversation.

Put down the weight of your aloneness

and ease into the conversation.

The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink,

the cooking pots have left
their arrogant aloofness

and seen the good in you at last.

All the birds and creatures of the world
are unutterably themselves.

Everything, everything,
everything is waiting for you.

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone.

As if life were a progressive
and cunning crime

with no witness, no witness
to the tiny hidden transgressions.

To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings.

Surely, surely, even you, at times,
have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus,

crowding out your solo voice.

You must note the way
the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you courage.

Alertness, alertness is the hidden
discipline of familiarity,

alertness is the hidden
discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor
of things to come,

the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,

and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness,
the weight of your aloneness

and ease into the conversation.

The kettle is singing,

the kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink,

even as it pours you a drink,

the cooking pots have left
their arrogant aloofness

and seen the good in you at last.

All the birds and creatures of the world
are unutterably, unutterably themselves.

Everything, everything is waiting for you.

This is a piece I wrote called

"Inevitably everything
is waiting for you"

(Laughter)

to remind myself of
the conversational nature of reality.

And to begin with,
the title sounds vaguely positive -

everything is waiting for you -

until you realize
that everything is waiting for you

including your own demise
and disappearance.

And this demise and disappearance

is one of the difficult parts
of the conversational nature of reality.

And what do I mean by
"the conversational nature of reality"?

When you think about it,

there's no single element in the world

that's not bonded to, flying away from,

or catalytic with
another element in the world.

And every creature,

even the smallest single-celled creature

is in a thousand different conversations

with a thousand other elements
and dynamics and forms

in order to keep itself alive

and its environment alive.

And every ecosystem in the world
is this astonishing meeting,

this conversation,

between various dynamics

that contribute to this central
conversation of life.

I lived in the Galápagos Islands
for a couple of years as a naturalist,

and the richest place in Galápagos
is the western part of Isabela Island

where you're looking off
into the middle of the Pacific

for a good few thousand miles
to the Marquesas.

But in that place,

there's this upwelling current from below

that brings all of this astonishing
richness and nutrients and oxygen

from the depths

up to the warmth of the surface,

and when that oxygen and those nutrients
meet the warm water,

you get this astonishing
efflorescence of life.

But not only do you get

oxygen-rich, nutrient-rich
cold water meeting warm water,

you also have all of those elements
meeting the air, meeting the land,

meeting different gradations
of salinity and temperature.

Where all of those edges meet,

you get this astonishing conversation

and you get this astonishing
depth and plethora of life.

And so it's an interesting
question to ask yourself,

to ask the organization
that you're a part of

but also to ask yourself
as an individual identity,

How many edges in conversations
are actually meeting inside me?

Or am I a monocultural idea,
which I attempt to project upon reality?

(Laughter)

Because one of the essential dynamics of
the conversational nature of reality is,

whatever you as an individual
would like to happen in the world

will not happen exactly
as you would like it,

but equally, whatever the world,
your society, your organization,

the people you serve in life

want you to do

will also not occur.

You will not comply exactly
as they would like you to comply.

And what occurs is this third frontier,

this conversational reality, actually.

And the ability to actually
create an identity

where you can live at that frontier

is one of the great triumphs
of a human life

and has been celebrated

in all our cultures and traditions
since the beginning of time.

But it takes a different form of identity
than the strategic part of your mind,

which sees yourself
as a piece of ammunition

which you're going to fire
at the target of existence, you know.

And so the whole - to my mind -
the whole of existence,

the whole of creation,

is actually trying to find
an internal anchorage inside us

which reflects its astonishing
symmetry outside of us,

and that in order
for an individual human being

or an individual organization

to live out its life,

it has to find that edge between
its own particular signature and genius,

and what its being called into
by its surrounding world.

And the ability to live at that live edge
and to create an individual identity,

a leadership identity, if you're actually
helping to run an organization,

or a civic identity,

where you're representing
the future of your country, actually,

in a living imaginative way

is one of our necessary
disciplines of this time.

And you could say at the moment, you know,

with those squares
filled with people in Cairo,

you've got people there
who are on an edge,

who are on a frontier,

and they are in conversation
not only with what they know they want

but with this astonishing unknown,

which is about to come into incarnation

through the way that they're simply
paying attention to the future.

And there was a great line
by an early-20th-century Spanish poet,

Antonio Machado,

he said,

"Caminante, no hay camino,

se hace camino al andar.

Al andar se hace el camino ..."

"Caminante - pathmaker -

there is no path.

Pathmaker, there is no path.

You make the path by walking.

By walking, you make the path."

And he's looking at what the physicists
and students of complexity

would say is the iterative
nature of reality,

that you actually change the world
by actually meeting it

simply by being present

and simply by beginning a conversation.

That conversation can be verbal,

but the world can also be changed
through your attentive presence.

And we all know this

and the way we can actually change
the conversation with another person

through being attentive
and present in listening,

but we also know

in the abstruse theory of particle physics

that the observer actually moves the world

by the way they are actually
looking at that world.

So everything, no matter
where you are, how you stand,

is being affected by the way you stand.

And so it seems to me that reality
is constantly coming to our door

and saying, "Why not
get with the program?"

"Why not come out from behind yourself,

get out from behind this wall
you've set up for yourself

that you call you,

and meet something other than yourself?"

And there was a great old -
what I thought was a Taoist poem.

I recited and read this poem
to myself for years,

and I thought it was a Taoist sage
and it was written about 2,000 years ago.

It turns out it was written
by an Irish fellow, a Dubliner,

in the 1920s.

(Laughter)

But this fellow is a brilliant writer,

and he wrote in such a Taoist style
that he gave himself a Chinese name,

which was [Wei Wu Wei].

But he was an Irish fellow,

and there I was saying, "Chinese sage,
[Wei Wu Wei], dadadada,"

and it turns out, you know, that -

but this is a brilliant little piece
written in the Taoist style, and he says,

"Why are you unhappy?
Why are you unhappy?"

Just relax. He's Irish and he's a poet -
he'll answer it for you.

"Why are you unhappy?

Because 98.98%

of everything you do
and all that you say is for yourself,

and there isn't one."

"Why are you unhappy?

Because 98.98% of everything you do
and all that you say is for yourself,

and there isn't one."

What does he mean by that?

There's no self that will survive
a real conversation.

There's no self that will survive a real
meeting with something other than itself.

There's no organization
that will keep its original identity

if it's in the conversation.

And after a while,

you realize you don't want
to actually keep that old static identity;

you want to move
the pivot of your presence

from this thing you think is you

into this meeting with the future,

with the people you serve,

with your family,

with your loved ones.

And it's in this self-forgetfulness,

where you meet something
other than yourself,

that all kinds of
astonishing things happen.

And I worked for a good few years

with all of the top managers
at the Boeing company

and working with the conversational nature
of the business reality.

But at the end of it, they asked me to -

they commissioned me to write a poem
for the triple seven aeroplane,

which was about to be launched

and which had just won
a big aerospace trophy,

and there was to be a huge dinner
in celebration of this trophy,

and they wanted a poem
at everyone's placing.

And so I had the phone call
from the executive,

saying, "Would you write
a poem for the triple seven?"

And I said, "Poets don't do very well
under these circumstances."

I said, "They usually write
very, very bad poetry."

But I said, "I'll have a go at it,

and if I have anything decent,
I'll send it to you,

but otherwise, you should
just have a blank space there."

Pasternak said at the convocation
for the five-year plan,

"The poet's seat should be empty" -

during the Soviet days -

at the convocation for the five-year plan,
the poet's seat should be empty.

But anyway, I had a go
at the old five-year plan,

and I sat down and I said to myself,

"You know, you spent a good deal
of your life on aeroplanes,

so just put yourself back in that seat."

And I did.

And I had this sudden remembrance
of what it's like to be on a plane,

where quite often

you have this astonishing creation
outside the windows.

You can be flying into San Francisco,

the sun's going down
over the Oakland hills,

the moon's coming up
over the ocean, you know,

and it's absolutely astonishing.

You look inside the plane -
everyone's reading People magazine.

You're flying over the Alps,

you're looking down
at Mont Blanc, you know,

everyone's working on their BlackBerry.

So one of the dynamics
of being up in the plane

is that no one really wants to face up
to the reality of what they're doing, yes.

You look out of the window -
there's no visible means of support.

(Laughter)

I'm not having the conversation;
it's not occurring.

I'm in my own little world,
and I don't have to participate.

But sometimes, as you're dropping down

through these astonishing levels
of humidity and temperature,

you will sometimes
be privileged with a view

of that white line
passing over the curve of the wing,

and you realize that the forces
that are holding the plane up

are as solid as concrete,

but they're made up of a conversation

between the velocity of the plane
and the shape of the wing,

and you need both -

if you lose either end
of the conversation,

you're going to arrive
a lot earlier than you'd like.

(Laughter)

So you don't get to choose
between yourself and this other,

between the shape of yourself
and what's passing around you.

So this is the piece
I wrote for the plane,

but also to look at the way

that human beings
can travel enormous distances -

they don't have to do the work;

they simply have to have the conversation,

and the conversation
does all the work for you.

The organization doesn't
have to do the work;

it just has to have the conversation
with the people itself.

The conversation creates a dynamic

whereby you look around
and the work's being done.

So I don't have to take the world on
as a burden and a weight;

I don't have to kill myself

even if I'm in a real position
of responsibility.

I just have to turn to face
towards what is actually calling me

and what I'm surrounded by.

So this is the piece,

and it's called "Working Together."

We shape our selves to fit this world,

we shape our selves to fit this world

and by the world are shaped again.

We shape our selves to fit this world

and by the world are shaped again.

The visible and the invisible
working together in common cause,

to produce the miraculous.

We shape our selves to fit this world

and by the world are shaped again.

The visible and the invisible
working together in common cause,

to produce the miraculous,

to produce the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way,

I am thinking of the way

the intangible air traveled at speed
round a shaped wing

easily holds our weight.

I'm thinking of the way

the intangible air traveled at speed
round a shaped wing

easily holds our weight.

So may we,

so may we, in this life trust

to those elements
we have yet to see or imagine.

So may we, in this life trust

to those elements
we have yet to see or imagine,

and find the true shape,
find the true shape of our own selves,

by forming it well
to the great intangibles about us.

We shape our selves,

we shape our selves to fit this world

and by the world are shaped again.

The visible and the invisible
working together in common cause,

to produce the miraculous,

the miraculous.

I'm thinking of the way the intangible air

traveled at speed round a shaped wing

easily holds our weight.

So may we, in this life,
in this life trust

to those elements
we have yet to see or imagine,

trust to those elements
we have yet to see or imagine,

and find the true shape,

the true shape of our own selves
by forming it well,

by forming it well
to the great intangibles about us.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)