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

by David Whyte

The first step in spending time alone is to admit how afraid of it we are.

To be alone for any length of time is to shed an outer skin.

aloneness asks us to make a friend of silence,

aloneness always leads to rawness and vulnerability,

Ambition is desire frozen, the current of a vocational life immobilised and over-concretised to set, unforgiving goals.

the very disease of ambition is that it can be so easily explained to others.

but a true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves, breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place.

No matter the self-conceited importance of our labours we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine.

A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones, onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, in conversation with the elements. Looking back, we see the wake we have left as only a brief glimmering trace on the waters.

the underlying primary gift of having been both a witness to and a full participant in the conversation.

the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and those things for which we are willing to hazard and even imperil ourselves.

What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it.

Anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for all these outer things

In their helplessness they turn their violence on the very people who are the outer representation of this inner lack of control.

But anger truly felt at its centre is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here;

BEAUTY is the harvest of presence, the evanescent moment of seeing or hearing on the outside what already lives far inside us;

Beauty is an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting:

It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought:

Besieged or left alone, we seem to live best at the crossroad between irretrievable aloneness and irretrievable belonging, and even better, as a conversation between the two where no choice is available.

We find that having people knock on our door is as much a privilege as it is a burden; that being seen, being recognised and being wanted by the world, and having a place in which to receive everyone and everything, is infinitely preferable to its opposite.

To consciously become close is a courageous form of unilateral disarmament, a chancing of our arm and our love, a willingness to hazard our affections and an unconscious declaration that we might be equal to the inevitable loss that the vulnerability of being close will bring.

To confess is to free oneself,

Deathbed confessions happen so frequently because, in the light of our imminent demise and disappearance, preserving the old fearful identity that kept the secret is seen to be absurd, almost laughable; we are suddenly not the thing we have been defending all along.

To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.

live to the point of tears,

where the touchable rawness of life becomes part of the fabric of the everyday,

Denial is an ever-present and even splendid thing when seen in the light of its merciful and elemental powers to cradle and hold an identity until it is ready to move on.

Refusing to face what we are not yet ripe and ready to face can help us to live through the more than enough difficulties of the present.

All of us live with temporary names and temporary stories, which allow us to breathe the air of the present while looking into the eyes of enormous powers that make up our immediate horizon of understanding.

Denial is the crossroads between perception and readiness; to deny denial is to invite powers into our lives we have not yet readied ourselves to meet.

despair is the time in which we both endure and heal, even when we have not yet found the new form of hope.

Despair turns to depression and abstraction when we try to make it stay beyond its appointed season and start to shape our identity around its frozen disappointments.

Despair is kept alive by freezing our sense of time and the rhythms of time; when we no longer feel imprisoned by time, and when the season is allowed to turn, despair cannot survive.

A season left to itself will always move, however slowly, under its own patience, power and volition.

We are shaped by our shaping of the world and are shaped again in turn.

The way we face the world alters the face we see in the world.

The attempt to create a life devoid of disappointment is the attempt to avoid the vulnerabilities that make the conversations of life real, moving, and life-like; it is the attempt to avoid our own necessary and merciful heartbreak.

The measure of our courage is the measure of our willingness to embrace disappointment, to turn towards it rather than away;

the understanding that every real conversation of life involves having our hearts broken somewhere along the way

Disappointment is a friend to transformation, a call to both accuracy and generosity in the assessment of our self and others, a test of sincerity and a catalyst of resilience.

it is that wounded, branded, unforgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting.

At the end of life, the wish to be forgiven is ultimately the chief desire of almost every human being.

In refusing to wait, in extending forgiveness to others now, we begin the long journey of becoming the person who will be large enough, able enough and generous enough to receive, at the very end, that absolution ourselves.

FRIENDSHIP is a mirror to presence and a testamen...

All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.

the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

Each one of us is also a changing seasonal weather front, and what blows through us is made up not only of the gifts and heartbreaks of our own growing but also of our ancestors and the stories consciously and unconsciously passed to us about their lives.

Giving means paying attention and creating imaginative contact with the one to whom we are giving; it is a form of attention itself, a way of acknowledging and giving thanks for lives other than our own.

To give is also to carry out the difficult task of putting something of our own essence in what we have given.

to give appropriately always involves a tiny act of courage, a step of coming to meet, of saying I see you, and appreciate you and am also making an implicit promise for the future.