Breaking Promises
Growing up, my daughter Marea excelled at athletics. Basketball was the sport she was passionate about and the one our family most enjoyed, but she also played softball. When she was about 10-years-old, Marea was cajoled into joining a summer travel softball team. This meant that our family had to devote every single weekend to driving all over California to spend endless hours sitting on bleachers in the hot sun. It also meant that Marea had to attend softball practice almost every weekday.
This took place during a time when my husband and I were working extremely hard running our fast-growing business, and the hour commute to and from our office always felt long. On the weekends, all we wanted to do was stay out of the car and rest.
The sacrifice would have been worthwhile if Marea had been enjoying herself, but it quickly became way too much softball for her. She hated it. “Maybe you should quit,” I urged hopefully. “It’s still early in the season and the team has plenty of girls.” But Marea couldn’t bear to go back on her commitment. She didn’t want to be labeled a “quitter,” and because she played second base and was one of the team’s strongest hitters, she knew dropping out would disappoint her friends and coaches. So we all endured, week after interminable week, until the season was finally over.
Now, more than two decades later, Marea and I still often refer to the hard-learned lessons from that difficult summer. Being people who take our promises very seriously and don’t have an easy time changing course midstream, we only have to look each other in the eye and say “travel softball” to remind ourselves how grueling it can be to put other people’s wishes above our own.
Recently, David Whyte’s powerful poem, “To Break a Promise,” has inspired me to deeply ponder the nature of commitments. In a world that is constantly changing, is it always dishonorable to break a promise? When must we remain steadfast, and when should we move forward with bravery, humility and fortitude, leaving our promise behind?
In Whyte’s commentary about his poem, he explains that while religions and literature often talk about how to make and hold promises, there is almost nothing written that helps us “in the necessary art of breaking outworn, misguided, or out-of-season bonds…” He says that part of being human usually includes the necessity of “walking away from a promise that was no longer a promise for the future but an imprisoning bond to an abstract past.”
The themes in “To Break a Promise” feel especially relevant to me right now as several people in my life are navigating separations from their spouses—going through the extremely painful, but concurrently liberating, process of breaking vows they’d previously promised to keep for all time.
In my own life, this poem has inspired me to conduct an inventory of the previously unexamined internal “promises” that I never consciously made, but have nonetheless stayed unwaveringly loyal to. I can see that many of them aren’t promoting my peace of mind and well-being, such as living as if it’s my sworn duty to eliminate my mother’s suffering, and the habitual “vow” to always get as many things as possible done as quickly as possible, which means perennially rushing through my life.
This past week on our farm, we had many young apple trees that needed their fruit to be thinned. We failed to do this last year, and as a result, many limbs broke, laden with more fruit than the branches could support. So while I was focusing on unearthing my unconscious promises, I was simultaneously thinning apples, which served to reinforce the important benefits of being selective. While I felt sad about all the little apples I had to pull off and discard, I knew that doing so was the best way to give the remaining fruit the space and sustenance they need to flourish. And ultimately, it’s much better for the long-term health of the tree.
Identifying the unspoken promises that I live by, and then giving myself permission to prune the ones that no longer serve, has been both enlightening and transformative. A poem and my apple trees have helped me realize that in order to fully nurture the promises that support a healthy and joyful life in present-time, we’ll often need to do some selective thinning. As David Whyte wrote, “…let the promise go with the river. Stand up now. Have faith. Walk away.”
Take a Moment Micro-Meditation
Tiny pauses to be right here, right now can have big results. Our Take a Moment series of micro-meditations—all under two minutes long—make taking mindful pauses as easy as possible. We invite you to "Take a Moment" to find the calm that is always within you.
