"A World Lost, A World Unsuspected"
What do you do when the world falls apart?
“No defeat,” said William Carlos Williams, “is made up entirely of defeat since the world it opens is always a place formerly unsuspected. A world lost, a world unsuspected, beckons to new places.”
The poet-physician, Williams, was not born a poet, wanting to write as far back as he could remember. He wrote a very vibrant and sensitive autobiographical book a few years ago called, “I Wanted to Write a Poem” in which he tells us why his life took the direction it did.
It began with a heart attack when he was sixteen or seventeen. A race was mismanaged and he ran the eight laps. Then someone called out to him, “You’ve got another lap to run.” He did so.
Then, he tells us, “I was sick, vomiting sick, and my head hurt. When I got home my family called Doc Calhoun.” He said, “Heart murmur.”
Here was a teenager who lived for sports. They let him go to school, but no more baseball, no more running. He said he didn’t mind the running too much because there was a boy up the street he could never beat, but giving up the active life cut into his soul. His life had to change completely.
He could not be with the others after school and that hurt. He was forced back into himself. He began to read a great deal, and the desire to write grew in him.
“A world lost, a world unsuspected, beckons to new places.”
William Carlos Williams became not only a medical doctor but one of the country’s outstanding poets and lovers of life—a man who recognized pain and experienced it himself many times—a man who died after a long and painful illness—yet a man always on the watch, ready to respond to the beckoning to new places in human experiences.
Perhaps every one of us has or will lose part of a world, will suffer some defeat. Death comes to every family. One may lose a job. One may suffer some illness, physical or mental, or be called upon to cope with the illness and the lost world of someone he loves.
What do we do when our own world falls apart? Does it help much to say buck up, have faith, or some such trite offering? I doubt it. There may be a need, for a time, to weep unashamedly, to glimpse the pit of despair, to let the feelings one can no longer hold back come out in grief.
And then, in a quieter mood, we can begin to give up our anguish and refuse to entertain our self-pity. The time comes to look for the beckoning to new places.
There may be much or little we can do. What we can do we do, and then we do not attempt the impossible—we cannot go back to the old world; we begin where we are—we experience the relief of knowing we are instruments of something beyond us yet which moves through us, and will carry us into the future.
Anyone may become one of the “helpless ones” for a time, but who ever told us we could take on the world? That we could do it all? We give up a world, perhaps, because we must, and we open ourselves to a new world that shall appear only if we are receptive.
“No defeat is made up entirely of defeat…A world lost, a world unsuspected, beckons to new places.”
Prayer for a world lost, a world unsuspected:
Entering into the spirit of prayer,
Is to be in touch with our own reverence,
And if we can do that we may touch the eternal.
Do, thou, eternal one, enter this day that we may meet you on our way.
Turning the leaves of hope, let us hear and let us live
Ancient words that bear the mark of the eternal.
They come to us from Sanskrit:
Look to this day!
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the verities and
Realities of your existence:
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendor of beauty;
For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision;
But today, well lived, makes every yesterday
A dream of happiness,
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.
Amen.
