By willing and by intellectualising we have done all we can, for the time being. We only exhaust ourselves, and lose our lives—that is, our livingness, our power to live—by any further straining of the will and the intellect. It is time to take our hands off the throttle: knowing well enough what we are about, and choosing our course of action with a steady heart.
To take one’s hand off the throttle is not the same as to let go the reins.
Man lives to live, and for no other reason. And life is not mere length of days. Many people hang on, and hang on, into a corrupt old age, just because they have not lived, and therefore cannot let go.
We must live. And to live, life must be in us. It must come to us, the power of life, and we must not try to get a strangle-hold upon it. From beyond comes to us the life, the power to live, and we must wisely keep our hearts open.
But the life will not come unless we live. That is the whole point. “To him that hath shall be given.” To him that hath life shall be given life: on condition, of course, that he lives.
And again, life does not mean length of days. Poor old Queen Victoria had length of days. But Emily Brontë had life. She died of it.
And again “living” doesn’t mean just doing certain things: running after women, or digging a garden, or working an engine, or becoming a member of Parliament. Just because, for Lord Byron, to sleep with a “crowned head” was life itself, it doesn’t follow that it will be life for me to sleep with a crowned head, or even a head uncrowned. Sleeping with heads is no joke, anyhow. And living won’t even consist in jazzing or motoring or going to Wembley, just because most folks do it. Living consists in doing what you really, vitally want to do: what the life in you wants to do, not what your ego imagines you want to do. And to find out how the life in you wants to be lived, and to live it, is terribly difficult. Somebody has to give us a clue.
And this is the real exercise of power.
That settles two points. First, power is life rushing in to us. Second, the exercise of power is the setting of life in motion.
And this is very far from Will.