Parker Palmer On The Brink Of Everything Quotes

Wholeness is the goal [of life], but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.

To grow in love and service, you must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success.

Suffering breaks our hearts, but the heart can break in two different ways. There's the brittle heart that breaks into shards, shattering the one who suffers as it explodes, and sometimes taking others down when it's thrown like a grenade at the ostensible source of its pain. Then there's the supple heart, the one that breaks open, not apart, the one that can grow into greater capacity for the many forms of love. Only the supple heart can hold suffering in a way that opens to new life.

When I'm asked for the 'elevator speech' that sums up my work, I always respond, 'I always take the stairs, so I don't have an elevator speech. If you'd like to walk with me awhile, I'd love to talk.' I don't know of a life worth living or work worth doing that can be reduced to a sound bite." (40)

The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around -everything- we know ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, "I am -all- of the above." If we can't embrace the whole of who we are--embrace it with transformative love--we'll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and be unable to engage creatively with the world's complex mix of shadow and light.

I’ll be asking if I was faithful to my gifts, to the needs I saw around me, and to the ways I engaged those needs with my gifts—faithful, that is, to the value, rightness, and truth of offering the world the best I had, as best I could. For helping me understand this—and for imbuing

Smashing clay pots is called iconoclasm, a good thing when it’s needed. The failure to do it when needed is called idolatry, always a bad thing. In both writing and faith, we need to commit conceptual suicide again and again—if we are serious about the vastness of the treasure and the inadequacy of our frail, finite, and flawed words.

I no longer ask, “What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to hang on to?” Instead I ask, “What do I want to let go of, and what do I want to give myself to?” The desire to “hang on” comes from a sense of scarcity and fear. The desire to “give myself” comes from a sense of abundance and generosity. That’s the kind of truth I want to wither into.

If it’s true, as I claimed in the Prelude, that old is just another word for nothing left to lose, then taking the risk of a deep inward dive should get easier with age. It’s a risk we need to take. Aging and dying well, like everything else worth doing, require practice—practice going over the edge toward “the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest.

It’s unfair to lay all responsibility for the future on the younger generation. After all, the problems they face are partly due to the fact that we, their elders, screwed up. Worse still, it’s not true that the young alone are in charge of what comes next. We—young and old together—hold the future in our hands. If our common life is to become more compassionate, creative, and just, it will take an intergenerational effort.

Reach out to the younger generation—not to advise them but to learn from them, gain energy from them, and support them on their way. Erik Erikson called this kind of reaching out “generativity,” an alternative to the “stagnation” of age that sooner or later leads to despair. 2. Move toward whatever you fear, not away from it. I try to remember the advice I was given on an Outward Bound course when I was frozen with fear on a rock face in the middle of a 100-foot rappel: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!” If, for example, you fear “the other,” get into his or her story face-to-face, and watch your fear shrink as your empathy expands. 3. Spend time in the natural world, as much time as you can. Nature constantly reminds me that everything has a place, that nothing need be excluded. That “mess” on the forest floor—like the messes in my own life— has an amazing integrity and harmony to it.

These are brokenhearted people, but their hearts have been broken open rather than broken apart.

I ask three questions: Is it worth saying? Is it said clearly? Is it said beautifully?” I

out on the edge you can see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

Age brings diminishments, but more than a few come with benefits. I’ve lost the capacity for multitasking, but I’ve rediscovered the joy of doing one thing at a time. My thinking has slowed a bit, but experience has made it deeper and richer. I’m done with big and complex projects, but more aware of the loveliness of simple things: a talk with a friend, a walk in the woods, sunsets and sunrises, a night of good sleep. I have fears, of course, always have and always will. But as time lengthens like a shadow behind me, and the time ahead dwindles, my overriding feeling is gratitude for the gift of life. Above all, I like being old because the view from the brink is striking, a full panorama of my life—and a bracing breeze awakens me to new ways of understanding my own past, present, and future. As one of Kurt Vonnegut’s characters says in Player Piano, “out on the edge you can see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

We have no choice about death. But we do have choices to make about how we hold the inevitable—choices made difficult by a culture that celebrates youth, disparages old age, and discourages us from facing into our mortality. The laws of nature that dictate the sunset dictate our demise. But how we travel the arc between our own sunrise and sundown is ours to choose: Will it be denial, defiance, or collaboration?

We need to reframe aging as a passage of discovery and engagement, not decline and inaction.

standing closer to the reality of death awakens my wonder at the many gifts of life.

Old age is no time to hunker down, unless disability demands it. Old is just another word for nothing left to lose, a time of life to take bigger risks on behalf of the common good.

Every spring, commencement speakers take the stage across the country to tell the graduates, “Our hopes for the future are in your hands.” I have an urgent message for these speakers: in the name of God, don’t do it! It’s unfair to lay all responsibility for the future on the younger generation. After all, the problems they face are partly due to the fact that we, their elders, screwed up. Worse still, it’s not true that the young alone are in charge of what comes next. We—young and old together—hold the future in our hands. If our common life is to become more compassionate, creative, and just, it will take an intergenerational effort. Let’s stop talking about “passing the baton” to the young as we elders finish running our laps. Since most of us are more skilled at sitting than at running, let’s change the metaphor and invite young adults to join the orchestra. As we sit together, we can help them learn to play their instruments—while they help us learn the music of the emerging world, which they hear more clearly than we do. Together we can compose something lovelier and more alive than the current cacophony, something in which dissonance has a place but does not dominate.

Imparting hope to others has nothing to do with exhorting or cheering them on. It has everything to do with relationships that honor the soul, encourage the heart, inspire the mind, quicken the step, and heal the wounds we suffer along the way.

logical but ungrounded ideas. It’s not the ethical self that wants to live by someone else’s “oughts.” It’s not the spiritual self that wants to fly nonstop to heaven. True self is the self with which we arrive on earth, the self that simply wants us to be who we were born to be. True self tells us who we are, where we are planted in the ecosystem of life, what “right action” looks like for us, and how we can grow more fully into our own potentials. As an old Hasidic tale reminds us, our mission is to live into the shape of true self, not the shape of someone else’s life: Before he died, Rabbi Zusya said: “In the world to come they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”18 Memo to myself: stay on the ground, turn around, ask, and listen. True self is true friend—it’s a friendship we ignore at our peril. And pass the word: friends don’t let friends live at altitude.

More often than I like to admit, I’ve forgotten lessons learned and had to start over from scratch, relearning what I thought I knew. One advantage of age is the chance it gives us to learn and relearn until we truly know.

Depression was, indeed, the hand of a friend trying to press me down to ground on which it was safe to stand—the ground of my own being, with its messy mix of limits and potentials, liabilities and assets, darkness and light.

Merton goes on to say that the contradictions in our lives are engines of creativity. It’s true. If we got everything right or everything wrong, there’d be none of the divine discontent or the sense of possibility that animates our growth. What we get wrong makes us reach for something better. What we get right reassures us that the “better” is sometimes within our reach.

Old is just another word for nothing left to lose, a time of life to take bigger risks on behalf of the common good.

In the depths of winter,” said Camus, “I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and one of teaching’s great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back on the dance floor. It is the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.

The first essay in this chapter, “The Music of Mentoring,” comes from my own experience of being a mentor. But its roots reach back to the years when I was mentored, to the elders who graced my life and helped me find my path when I was young. Mentors kept showing up for me until I was in my mid-thirties—then they stopped coming. I grieved that fact for a while, until I saw the secret hidden in plain sight: it was my turn to pay it forward by serving as a mentor for members of the rising generation. Then I found another secret hidden behind the first one: when I help young people flourish, they return the favor.

In a prose passage on a life in art—without explanation or elaboration, as if the idea had just popped into his head and he had to capture it before it fled—Thoreau drops this simple couplet: My life has been the poem I would have writ But I could not both live and utter it.

The Cross is the sign of contradiction—destroying the seriousness of the Law, of the Empire, of the armies . . . But the magicians keep turning the cross to their own purposes. Yes, it is for them too a sign of contradiction: the awful blasphemy of the religious magician who makes the cross contradict mercy! This is of course the ultimate temptation of Christianity!