Consolations - Revised edition: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

by David Whyte

Loneliness is the very state that births the courage to continue calling, and when fully lived can undergo its own beautiful reversal, becoming in its consummation the far horizon that answers back.

To allow ourselves to feel fully alone is to allow ourselves to understand the particular nature of our solitary incarnation; to make aloneness a friend is to apprentice ourselves to the foundation from which we make our invitation to others. To feel alone is to face the truth

Loneliness is the place from which we pay real attention to voices other than our own;

Longing is divine discontent;

Longing is felt through the lens and ache of the body, magnifying

In longing we move, and are moving, from a known but abstracted elsewhere to a beautiful, about-to-be-reached someone, something, or somewhere we want to call our own.

is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts, most especially the ability, despite our many griefs and losses, to courageously inhabit the past, the present and the future all at once.

not just a then, recalled in a now; the past is never just the past: memory is a pulse passing through all created life, a waveform, a then continually becoming other thens, all the while creating a continual but almost untouchable now.

Memory makes the now fully inhabitable.

memory, in a sense, is the very essence of the conversation we hold as individual human beings.

We might recall the ancient Greek world where Memory was always understood to be the mother of the muses, meaning that all of her nine imaginative daughters, all of the nine forms of human creative endeavour recognised by the ancient Greek imagination, and longed for by individuals and societies to this day, were born from the womb and the body of memory.

We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with.

In many ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it, before we can utter the right words or understand what has happened to us, or is continuing to happen to us: an invitation to the most difficult art of all, to love without naming at all.

Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past; nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end.

or emotional pain is an ultimate form of ground, saying, to each of us, in effect, there is no other place than this place, no other body than this body, no other limb or joint or pang or sharpness or heartbreak but this searing presence.

Pain makes us understand reciprocation.

Pain is the first proper step to real compassion; it can be a foundation for understanding all those who struggle with their existence.

Lastly, pain is reluctant but unavoidable appreciation; appreciation most of all for the simple possibility of a pain-free life - all the rest is a miraculous bonus.

through a deeply felt hurt we have the possibility, just the possibility, of coming to know others as we have, with so much difficulty, and so much suffering, and so much pain, come to know ourselves.

In the human imagination a parallel world is not a world that replicates the one in which we live, or is its exact opposite, but one that turns and flows through many other possibilities and dimensionalities, all the while keeping company and somehow referencing the one it shadows. The parallel life is as unpredictable and indeterminate as the one that supposedly gave it its life.

There are many deathbeds where the path not taken is far more real and present than the one actually chosen; the man or the woman abandoned far more real than the wife or husband dutifully lived with for years.

a pilgrim is almost by definition someone abroad in a world of impending revelation, where something is always about to happen or be revealed, including, most fearfully, and as part of their eventual arrival, a strange rehearsal for their own disappearance.

We are still running around the house packing our bags and we have already gone and come back, even in our preparations; we are alone in the journey and we are just about to meet the people we have known for years.

Strangely, our arrival at that last transition along the way is exactly where we have the opportunity to understand who might have made the journey and to appreciate the privilege of having existed as a particularity, an immutable person; a trajectory whole and of itself.

To hate our procrastinating tendencies is in some way to hate our relationship with time itself, to be unequal to the phenomenology of revelation and the way it works its own way, in its very own gifted time, only emerging when the very qualities it represents have a firm correspondence in our necessarily struggling heart and imagination.

Procrastination enables us to taste the single malt essence of our own reluctance.

What is worthwhile carries the struggle of the maker written within it, but wrought into the shape of an earned understanding.

Procrastination helps us to be a student of our own reluctance,

To procrastinate is to be involved with larger entities than our own ideas, to refuse to settle for an early underachieving outcome and wrestle like Jacob with his angel, finding, as Rilke said, ‘Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows, by being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings.’

to admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present.

To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life.

Rest is the essence of giving and receiving; an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually, but also psychologically and physically.

To rest is not self-indulgent; to rest is to prepare to give the best of ourselves, and to perhaps, most importantly, arrive at a place where we are able to understand what we have already been given.

Without robustness all relationships become defined by their fragility, wither and begin to die.

Robustness and vulnerability belong together.

Robustness means we can veer off either side of the line while keeping a firm ongoing intent. Robustness is the essence of parenting: both of children and ideas.

To come out and meet the world again is to heal from isolation, from grief, from illness, from the powers and traumas that first robbed us of that meeting and of a vital sense of presence in the world; to be robust again is to leave the excuses we have made not to risk ourselves and to find ourselves alive once more in the encounter.

Robustness is not an option in most human lives, to choose its opposite is to become invisible.

Standing on the hot stone streets, the statue of Caesar Augustus stands against the sky, the marble hand beckoning to a future which will never come to pass and never could come to pass. The city of the eternal is actually the city that most celebrates the insubstantiality of human striving.

Everything saying, sotto voce, that though we have our moment in the sun, we might be best understood, might even be most ourselves, as a beautiful ruin; most real when we are on our way out, or even gone altogether.

is what most human beings would like to do a great deal of the time.

want to run away is an essence of being human; it transforms any staying through the transfigurations of choice.

Presence may be only fully understood and realised through fully understanding our reluctance to show up.

In the wild, the best response to dangerous circumstances is often not to run but to assume a profoundly attentive identity, to pay attention to what seems to threaten and, in that attention, not to assume the identity of the victim. Through being equal to fierce circumstances we make ourselves larger than the part of us that wants to flee, while not losing its protective understandings about when it might be appropriate. Besides, there is rarely one discrete identity who needs to run.