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Sunday, February 3, 2013

POETRY | David Whyte : The Courageous Step


The Courageous Step
-David Whyte

Why is it so difficult to take the first, necessary, close-in, courageous step to claiming our happiness in life? Perhaps, because taking that step immediately leads to a kind of radical internal simplification, where, suddenly, large parts of us, parts of us that had been kept gainfully employed for years; parts of us we thought absolutely necessary to the story, are suddenly out of a job. There occurs in effect a massive form of internal corporate downsizing, where the naysayers in us that do not wish to participate are let go, with all of the accompanying death-like trauma, and where the last fight occurs, a rear guard disbelief that this new, less complicated self, is equal to the new possibilities ahead. –It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer in than we could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that that step is simpler, more radical than we had thought: which is why we so often prefer the story to be more complicated, our identities equally clouded by fear and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility.

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