Besieged is how most people feel most of the time: by events, by people, by all the necessities of providing, parenting or participating and even by the creative possibilities they have set in motion themselves, and most especially, a success they have achieved through long years of endeavor.
As creatures we define ourselves through belonging or not belonging, we cannot help but make commitments to people, places and things, which then come looking for us. Conscious or unconscious, we are surrounded not only by the vicissitudes of a difficult world but even more by those of our own making.
If the world will not go away then the great discipline seems to be the ability to make an identity that can live in the midst of everything without feeling beset. Being besieged ask us to begin the day not with a to do list but a not to do list, a moment outside of the time-bound world in which it can be reordered and reprioritized. In this space of undoing and silence we create a foundation from which to re-imagine our day and ourselves. Beginning the daily conversation from a point of view of freedom and being untethered, allows us to re-see ourselves, to reenter the world as if for the first time.
We find that having people knock on our door is as much a privilege as it is a burden; that being seen, being recognized and being wanted by the world and having a place in which to receive everyone and everything, is infinitely preferable to its opposite.
-- from Consolations, by David Whyte p. 27-30
