How Did I Get Here?: Navigating the unexpected turns in love and life. Barbara Angelis De
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want what we want now. We are impatient, not very good at waiting for long-term results and possessing little tolerance of things that take time.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could set a time limit on our trials and challenges, like those speed-dating services that offer meetings with twenty people in one evening? This would be “speed-growing”—go through your issues and learn your lessons in one day! Unfortunately, as you already know too well, this isn’t how it works.
Digging deep for wisdom isn’t something that goes quickly or can be rushed through. It is more a state of mind than a set time period during which we decide to examine our lives. The process of digging deep can last for months, even years. It requires that we stay with the questions, and that we not be in a hurry to answer them.
Digging deep for wisdom takes time because it is not simply a search for some facts or answers, but a search for the truth. Our usual skills of problem-solving, finding answers and figuring things out will not do. Digging deep requires authentic and prolonged contemplation.
Contemplation has been an integral part of the path of all great philosophers and spiritual seekers since the beginning of recorded history. The word contemplation contains the Latin root templum, meaning a piece of consecrated ground, a building (temple) of worship, a place devoted to a special and lofty purpose. The dictionary defines contemplation as “to view with continued attention.” In traditional religious understanding, contemplation is an inner communion with God, as opposed to prayer, which might be called a conversation with God.
For our purposes, we can think of contemplation as the act of paying continued attention to that special place within us from which truth, insight, revelation and enlightenment spring forth. When you dig deep for wisdom, you contemplate your questions, your unexpected challenges and your turning points, and you wait for answers. As Rilke put it in his beautiful poem, you “live the questions.”
Have you ever gazed at the night sky, hoping to see a shooting star? You stare for a long time at the twinkling constellations, the distant galaxies, and they are beautiful, but no shooting stars appear. Suddenly, just when you think your search has been in vain, you see it—a brilliant flash of light arching across the heavens. It is spectacular, and something worth waiting for.
Contemplation is slow. It takes time. It can be uncomfortable, exasperating, even painful. But if you are patient, your wait will be worth it.
Several months ago, I decided to replant a portion of my garden. I’d tried to get flowers to grow in this part of the yard, but for some reason they always died. I thought perhaps the soil needed to be weeded and turned over, and that this would help the new flowers to thrive, and so I hired a man to dig up all of the weeds and prepare the soil for planting.
The gardener began his work early one morning, but within minutes he came to the front door and asked me to look at something he’d found while digging. “See this?” he said pointing into the freshly dug hole. “These are the old roots of a tree that must have been here at one time. It was a big tree, because these roots go very deep and spread out for ten feet in each direction. No wonder you had a hard time getting things to grow.”
There is an old saying: “Dig deep enough and you will hit something.” Usually we hit something we didn’t know was there, something unexpected. There are many things within you waiting to be discovered like the old roots buried beneath the soil in my garden. Perhaps some are roots of old emotional issues that you did not know existed, ones that have been keeping you blocked that you can now dig out and remove. Others are rare, important treasures, excavated from the depths of your being, priceless gems of understanding and clarity that, once revealed, will change you forever.
Digging deep for wisdom means being willing to unearth anything and everything you find inside yourself. It means digging until you discover precious treasures of insight, revelation and awakening, that which transforms you, that which you could have never known was there unless you were forced to dig.
In my first year of college, I began practicing daily meditation, and soon after I attended a six-month meditation intensive with a renowned spiritual master in order to become a meditation teacher myself. The course consisted of some lectures, studies and yoga, but the core of the process was meditating for up to twelve hours a day. I’d always had profound experiences meditating for twenty minutes at a time and never found it challenging, but this was different. Sitting in meditation for this many hours was like taking the biggest shovel in existence and digging deep, deep, deep within myself. I would be fine for the first half-hour, but then I would hit a roadblock of thoughts and emotions that seemed to prevent me from going deeper. “I must be doing this wrong,” I would think to myself in a panic. “Maybe I should get up for a while, and then start over when I am more relaxed.” The truth was that I was terrified to go deeper. What if I found out something about myself I didn’t like? What if I didn’t have a core of peace and happiness inside?
My teacher was a wonderful storyteller with a compassionate, joyful presence. He took great delight in the tales he told us, as if he himself had never heard them before. Every evening after our long day of meditation and study, he would gather us together to sit with him, and for several hours he would share his wisdom, answer questions, and of course tell marvelous stories.
One night a young man stood up and complained that he had been feeling restless and distracted during meditation, as I had, and he confessed that whenever this happened, he would get up, walk to the store in the nearby village, read through some magazines, and then when he felt less agitated, he would walk back and sit down again to meditate. When my teacher heard this, he laughed and laughed as if he’d never heard anything so amusing in his life. When he finally stopped laughing, he shared this story with us, his version of a classic ancient parable. Here it is as I remember it:
Once there was a farmer who was in desperate need of water to save his crops from dying. The drought had lasted for several years, and so with no hope of rain, he decided to dig a well. He began digging, and hour by hour the hole got deeper and deeper, but still no there was no water to be found. “I must be digging in the wrong spot,” he concluded at the end of the day, “for all I’ve discovered in this hole are rocks and tree roots.” Exhausted and discouraged, he returned home.
The next morning, shovel in hand, the farmer began digging again, this time in a different spot. As the sun blazed overhead and he dug deeper, again he found no water. “This second hole is as bad as the first,” he muttered to himself as he climbed out of the dry hole as the sun was setting.
Day after day the farmer dug one hole after another, and each time he would get the same results—no water. And as he laid down his shovel and walked home, head hung low, he would wonder if he was crazy to believe there was any water to be found. “Am I doomed to spend my life digging and finding nothing?” he moaned to himself. “I must be cursed in some way.”
One day a traveling wise man was passing by the farmer’s plot of land. To his surprise, he saw the farmer, shovel in hand, digging a hole surrounded by twenty similar holes.
“What are you doing, my friend?” the wise man asked the farmer, who was knee-deep in dirt.
“I’m digging a well—at least, I’m trying to.” the farmer replied in a forlorn voice. “But so far, I have only had horrible luck, for I keep hitting rocks and roots—everything but water.”
“Dear sir, you will never find water digging that way!” the wise man said kindly.
“What other way is there?” asked the farmer.
“Your efforts at digging are valiant, but they are not working,” explained the wise man. “You start digging in one place, and after ten feet when you don’t find water, you stop, go to another place, and start to dig all over again. However, the water table in this village starts at least twenty feet below the surface.”
“Unless you dig longer and deeper, you won’t find what you are searching for. Stay in one place, dig down deep and don’t stop when you