Finding your undercurrent

David Whyte, the poet and thinker, talks movingly about what it takes to detect the undercurrent of our lives, the slow, long-term direction of movement that is always there, whether we are aware of it or not. In the end, the conclusion he reaches is that we can only have a chance of finding our undercurrent when  we take time out to stop splashing around in the direction we're pursuing and stop. Completely. Then calm our restless selves down. Wait. Listen. Smell the breeze.

This is not just a call to be more meditative, although this in itself would benefit all of us. It's also a call to that kind of highly effective, but utterly relaxed and creative life that we see in a few people we tend to regard as saints or gurus.

One observer of the lives of the great saints noted that they seemed to operate with a "certain kind of large leisure," a sort of effortlessness, almost playfulness, in which they seemed to be constantly in the flow, in the zone. They did not seem to work hard, nor even to work smart, but to work with their undercurrent rather than to ignore or fight against it. They seem to have reached great heights of effectiveness by aligning all their activities, attitudes and motivations with their very deepest personal and spiritual values and abilities. As a consequence, they don't choose the wrong projects, or fight the wrong battles.

They have learned to become exactly who they were meant to be. You can, if you're attentive, come across people in every walk of life who display this kind of effortless, charming congruence, who strike you as being completely authentic. I said this once to a musician I had just heard perform brilliantly, and she was genuinely taken aback and delighted.

And by the same token, something within us unconsciously weeds out people who don't strike such a true note. People who have learned scripted ways of interacting, people who want something but have been trained to develop "rapport" before asking for it, people who are being professionally nice, people who are "at work" even in social situations.

For most of us, I suspect, we spend at least some time, maybe even a long time, working against our undercurrent, generally in the West because we aren't brave enough to give up our career or financial ambitions to do anything else. We have mortgages, kids at university and so on. And it does seem like hard work.

Where would your undercurrent take you if you stopped fighting it? My feeling is that we can probably all answer this question if we are prepared to embrace the silence and listen to the still, small voice. The one common factor, I would bet, is that there will be a finacial motive for not going with your undercurrent. You will soon say "I can't afford it." And maybe this is what Jesus meant when he told us that the love of money is the root of all evil.