The interesting dynamic about human happiness in the marriage to work is that we can glide down the road in the metaphorical Jaguar XK 150, having a … - David Whyte

We are shaped by our shaping of the world.

No matter how narrow our perceptions become in the daily obsessions of the organization, there is no such thing as a life lived only within an organization. There are other necessities calling us to a much greater participation than any corporation can offer. The most efficiently run, streamlined organization, the best-groomed, most-organized executive is interwoven with the ragged vagaries of creation, and despite our best attempts to anchor ourselves in the concrete foundations of profitability and permanence, we remain forever at the whim, mercy, and pleasure of the wind-blown world.

Ironically, we bring more vitality into our organizations when we refuse to make their goals the measure of our success and start to ask about the greater goals they might serve, and when we stop looking to them as parents who will supply necessities we can only obtain when we wrestle directly with our own destiny.

In a sense, we place the same burdens on our organizational life as we place on the rest of our existence. We feel there is something wrong at the center of it all, and we have to put it right. We are forever looking for a cure for our ills. We do this by placing ourselves in the position of manager, of thus managing change. Unless it is managed, something is wrong. But our real unconscious and underlying wish is to find a cure for the impermanence of life, and for that there is no remedy. Most of the difficulties we confront at work are no different from those human beings have been dealing with for millenia. Life is full of loneliness, failure, grief, and loss to an extent that terrifies us, and we will do anything to will ourselves another existence.

Santiago

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside
hiding then revealing the way you should take,
the road dropping away from you as if leaving you
to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when you thought you would fall,
and the way forward always in the end
the way that you followed, the way that carried you
into your future, that brought you to this place,
no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,
no matter that it had to break your heart along the way:
the sense of having walked from far inside yourself
out into the revelation, to have risked yourself
for something that seemed to stand both inside you
and far beyond you, that called you back
to the only road in the end you could follow, walking
as you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voice
that by night became a prayer for safe arrival,
so that one day you realized that what you wanted
had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place
you had lived in before you began,
and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and the mind and the promise
that first set you off and drew you on and that you were
more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way
than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach:
as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city
with golden towers, and cheering crowds,
and turning the corner at what you thought was the end
of the road, you found just a simple reflection,
and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back
and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse:
like a person and a place you had sought forever,
like a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond;
like another life, and the road still stretching on.