Rilke’s Swan
In his poem “The Swan,” Rainer Maria Rilke writes about “the awkward way the swan walks.” Or as another translator renders the original German: “the awkward waddle of the swan.” Or, from a third translation: “the uncreated lumbering gait of the swan.” The swan doesn’t cure her awkwardness by trying harder, walking faster, or resting on a patch of grass before waddling off again. She does it by “lowering herself into the water,” where, in her element, doing what she was created for, the swan “glides on in her majestic way.”
Being in your element, doing what comes naturally, putting yourself in a position to glide on in your majestic way—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Antidote To Exhaustion
After years of loving the work he was doing at an environmental nonprofit, David Whyte started to burn out. On one particularly bad day at the office, “I felt as if I didn’t have an ounce of energy left to do the work I had been doing,” Whyte wrote. “I was so exhausted, so burned out, I just went home.” That night, as he often did, Whyte met up with a close friend—a Benedictine monk named Brother David Steindl-Rast—to read poetry over a couple glasses of wine. As Brother David read aloud, Whyte tried to follow along, “but I had my day on my mind, and the mind-numbing tiredness I was experiencing at work.” “Brother David?” Whyte blurted out, interrupting the reading. “Tell me about exhaustion.” Brother David studied Whyte’s face for a moment, saw both the seriousness and the exhaustion in his eyes, and replied, “You know the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?” “The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest,” Whyte repeated, making sure he heard him right. “What is it then?” “The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.” Brother David was one of the few people who knew that Whyte secretly wanted to be a poet, a path he’d stepped off of years earlier in favor of a more practical, sensible, respectable one. He also knew that suppressing what you really want in life is quietly exhausting work. “You are so tired through and through,” Brother David said, “because you are only half here.” The other half is constantly, invisibly at work—day after day, year after year—consumed by the task of pushing aside your deepest desires. And the strain of keeping up that kind of divided, half-here existence “will kill you after a while,” Brother David said. “You are like Rilke’s Swan in his awkward waddling across the ground…You only have to touch the elemental waters in your life,” stepping back onto the path you know you belong on.
A Grim, Gray Rush Past An Incognito Musician
At 7:51 a.m. on January 12, 2007, one of the world’s great classical musicians, Joshua Bell, began playing a $3.5 million violin in a Washington D.C. Metro station. In an experiment devised by a Washington Post staff writer named Gene Weingarten, Bell wore jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a baseball hat to appear as if he were just any other busker. Over the next 43 minutes, 1,097 commuters passed by. Just 7 stopped to listen. Weingarten called it proof of “the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world…If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth — then what else are we missing?” Of the video captured by a hidden camera, he adds, “You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch…[It’s] a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity. But I don’t think that’s what the experiment proves. Days earlier, Bell had played to a packed house at Boston’s Symphony Hall, and weeks after busking in the Metro station, he would begin a sold-out tour across Europe. That people fill concert halls around the world to hear Bell play seems to be proof that the appreciation for beauty is very much alive. Bell later said of the Metro performance that he felt unusually uncomfortable—more nervous than he gets on the biggest stages in the world. “I was stressing,” he said. “When you play for ticket-holders, you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I’m already accepted. Here, there was this thought: ‘What if they don’t like me? What if they resent my presence.’” A cavernous Metro station with poor acoustics during the peak of the morning rush to work—Bell was out of his element. “This shows,” as one person commented on the video of Bell’s incognito performance, “that no matter how talented you are…if you’re not in the right environment, no one will see the true worth or even understand the potential you have. That’s why you gotta get yourself out of places where you’re not appreciated.” And into the elemental waters you belong in, where you and what you do are appreciated.
A Generation-Defining Climb Because Of A Career-Defining Realization
In an interview, the professional rock climber Alex Honnold was given a piece of paper and asked to draw the trajectory of his career. This is what he drew:
Beginning at the age of 18 when he was living out of a van and climbing all over the Western U.S., for ten to eleven years, “it was kind of like nothing,” Honnold said, drawing a flat line along the age axis. “Then it was kind of flat but growing a little. And then it jumped and started growing at a much faster rate.” The inflection point, where it jumped and began accelerating, was around the time he had an important realization. In climbing, every rock face is assigned a grade—a number that measures how difficult it is to climb. For years, Honnold oriented his training entirely around climbing harder and harder grades. The hardest grades demand brute strength—raw, explosive power. But Honnold is naturally quite lean. His natural strength isn’t explosive power, it’s endurance, the ability to climb longer than pretty much anyone else. So those years of training—it was like a long-distance runner training like a sprinter. “I had this realization,” Honnold said, “where it occurred to me that if you want to do your absolute best at something, focus on your strengths, focus on what you’re best at. And the thing that I’m best at is climbing relatively moderate grades, all day long without getting tired. And that’s what you need to be able to free solo El Cap.” El Capitan is a 3,000-foot granite wall in Yosemite Valley, which Honnold free soloed—climbing without any equipment or protection whatsoever—in 2017. It was when he became the first person to free solo El Cap, a feat called “the moon landing of free soloing” and “a generation-defining climb,” that Honnold’s career trajectory jumped and started growing at a much faster rate. And it came out of the realization, he said, “that I should just quit stressing, trying to be a climber that I’m not, and focus on the type of climber that I am. And that the type of climber that I am is capable of free soloing El Cap.”
Express Your Unique Character
Josh Waitzkin, a chess prodigy, quit playing chess around the age of 18. “I was a naturally creative, aggressive chess player,” Waitzkin explained. “My style was to create chaos on the chessboard, and my strength lay in finding hidden harmonies.” With this style, Waitzkin won the U.S. Junior Chess Championship at the age of 11 and became an International Master at age 16. Then, Waitzkin got a coach who forced him to play like the world champions, Anatoly Karpov and Tigran Petrosian—“the most positional, conservative chess players.” Out of his element, forced to play a style that didn’t align with his natural proclivities, Waitzkin said, “I lost my love for the game.” So Waitzkin quit playing chess, and shortly after, he took up martial arts. He trained for just two years before he won his first national championship in martial arts. Asked if he took anything from chess into the martial arts, Waitzkin said he leaned into his unique physical and mental traits. “And in my observation of competitors in any discipline, this is a really fundamental idea,” he said. “Those who succeed at the highest level, I think, basically manifest their unique character through their discipline.”
Different People In Different Situations
In psychology, “Situationism” is the idea that a person’s personality and behavior is influenced by the situation or context they’re in. “Individual behavior differs as much across different situations as does the behavior of different people,” explain the behavioral researchers Don Moore and Max Bazerman. “Even the most loquacious extroverts are quiet when they ride in an elevator with strangers; at cocktail parties even the shyest introverts talk to others.” When they’re not in their element, even a virtuoso can question their musical abilities, a gifted climber can flatline, a prodigious chess player can lose their love for the game, and a graceful swan can look very awkward.