Like Rilke once said, I have seen myself as living “my life in widening circles.” What that means has changed a lot over the years. I admit that I once saw myself as having a wide impact on the world, or at least a good part of it. I saw myself as touching the lives of many in a healing, loving way.
I even had a small taste of that imagined widening role those times when I stood before hundreds of people and attempted to give them guidance on how to lead a good life.
That has changed. My wide horizons have shrunken year by year. My ambition of touching a wide world has shrunk from those years I spent being responsible for protecting the waters within the boundaries of Minnesota. I now pay much more attention to what happens on my small residential lot in Minneapolis.
I no longer aspire to touch the lives of many, and I realize that I may only truly touch the life I call my own. Sometimes I think I touch the lives of those who stand close to me. I am fortunate to have companions, and we live lives that touch one another and shape one another in the small intimacies we share. But it is only in touching my own life deeply that I realize that I am living a circle that reaches out and touches in widening ways.
To live in widening circles has come to mean that I must become intimately present in the tiny space and brief moment I occupy right now. Perhaps, there are times I am privileged to have companions that occasionally occupy a space close to mine. They are often a great support for my deep focus.
It has turned out that by learning to enter that narrow gap of deep focus that my life actually expands. Wideness follows me, touches what I have touched. It is not something I seek but it has become something I bring to the circle by first touching it in me.
I have no doubt that there are ways that I still touch the world in tangible concrete ways and affect the lives of others. But the widening circle is actually within. Others may come and go and share that intimate space with me. But more and more I am seeing it as a place of convergence. All is contained. It is a place without shape, without dimension and without boundaries.
It is a place of widening.