Brother David. Tell me about exhaustion.

I looked up at Brother David, the nearest thing I had to a truly wise person in my life, and found myself almost blurting.

"Brother David?"
I uttered in such an old, petitionary, Catholic way that I almost thought he was going to say, " Yes, my son?" But he did not; he turned his face toward me, following the spontaneous note of desparate sincerity, and simply waited.

"Tell me about exhaustion," I said.

He looked at me with an acute, searching, compassionate ferocity for the briefest of moments, as if trying to sum up the entirety of the situation and without missing a beat, as if he had been waiting all along, to say a life-changing thing to me. He said, in the form both of a question and an assertion:

"You know the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?"

"The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest," I repeated woodenly, as if I might exhaust myself completely before I reached the end of the sentence. "What is it then?"

"The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness."

He looked at me for a wholehearted moment, ...


"Crossing the unknown sea" by David Whyte