Everything is Waiting for You

The Extraordinary Benefits of Prolonged Attention

Session recordings and summaries for the May 2025 series, Everything is Waiting for You are available to all registered participants until September 1st, 2025.

The next series, The Courage in Poetry will take place July 13th, 20th and 27th.

Tuscany - May 2025, © David Whyte

Session 3 Summary

Welcome to the third Sunday in this series on Everything is Waiting for You – the constant unspoken sense that there is always something imminent, something about to arrive in every life. Also, that lacking this imminent sense of something surprising possibly about to arrive, can be a symptom or a foundational cause of deep depression in an individual life. All of our great contemplative disciplines emphasise that this imminent sense of arrival is harvested through paying really fierce attention – but that this harvest always causes upheaval in any settled life and is often exactly the reason why we refuse to pay attention to what is actually coming to fruition around us.

There is always a consequence and a harvest to deep and prolonged attention as everything is magnified and indeed accelerated and brought to new meaning often before our everyday, inattentive life is ready for it. Deep seeing comes from deep attention: from watching another’s face or mood, to observing the landscape, to sensing our own heart and mind, and even the turmoil within that heart and mind.

On the first Sunday, I worked with the revelations found in the natural world. The second Sunday, I explored how trauma and grief are also radically upsetting thresholds of attention: stepping stones across the difficult, flooding rivers of experience we all face. And today, I want to work with how deep attention can open a practical path in our lives – to good work, to finding a partner who is good for us, or a good community, a good place to live. Human beings are always, despite their most conservative elements, seeking the next threshold, the next land, the next love or the next phase of love with the same person. Then there is the next threshold of a work, where we’re brought further into the essence of our understanding, and shown that what we thought was just a job is, in fact, another dimension of an ever maturing life.

Many of the deeper states of attention we experience can be deeply upsetting. Weeping is a state we never desire, but find ourselves in at crucial thresholds of absolute breakdown in our lives. And if you’ve been raised in a masculine world, it can be especially difficult. We even have that saying: “It’s enough to make a grown man cry.” But whether or not we actually weep, we still feel the necessity for it and the numbness that arises from not giving ourselves over to it when it is necessary. Intuitively, we know what happens when we finally give ourselves over to tears – we enter a physical state of deep attention. In fact, I’d say full weeping is a form of temporary enlightenment. The deep, prolonged attention that arises out of difficulty and trauma, often leads us to choose work and professional life as a defence against internal or external vulnerability. We use it to avoid any form of emotional exposure. I want to explore the path into work, into vocation, into finding a partner, and into moving forward in a practical way – but one that includes the brilliance and beauty of the natural world around us, the necessity of trauma and difficulty, and the joy that comes with discovering a vocation that is truly our own. A path where we are living out a conversation we never quite felt we deserved to have, but somehow allowed ourselves to embark upon.