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

by David Whyte

Little wonder, then, that the holiday giving that is none of these - that is automatic, chore-based, ‘walking round the shopping centre’-based - exhausts us, debilitates us, and in the end is quite often subtly insulting to the one to whom we eventually give the random item.

gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness.

Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.

What haunts us is always something that seeks its own disappearance: it wants to become fully itself and so depart.

We cease to be haunted when we cease to be afraid of making what has been untouchable real and touchable again:

Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot.

But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.

If heartbreak is inevitable and inescapable, it might be asking us to look for it and make friends with it, to see it as our constant and instructive companion, and even perhaps in the depth of its impact, as well as in its hindsight, to see it as its own reward.

It may be that the ability to know the necessity for help, to know how to look for that help, and then, most importantly, how to ask for it, is one of the primary transformative dynamics that allows us to emancipate ourselves into each new epoch of our lives. Without the understanding that we need a particular form of aid at every crucial threshold in our lives, and without the robust vulnerability in asking for that help, we cannot pass through the door that bars us from the next dispensation of our lives: we cannot birth ourselves.

The need for help, our greatest vulnerability, may be the very door through which we must pass in order to open the next horizon of our lives.

HIDING is a way of staying alive.

We are hidden by life in our mother’s womb until we grow and ready ourselves for our first appearance in the lighted world; to appear too early in that world is to find ourselves with the immediate necessity for outside intensive care.

Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself.

HONESTY is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.

The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties:

all of us are afraid of loss, in all its forms; all of us, at times, are haunted or overwhelmed by the possibility of a disappearance; and all of us, therefore, are one short step away from dishonesty.

Honesty is grounded in humility, and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless.

To become honest is, in effect, to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness.

joy is practised generosity.

If joy is a deep form of abiding love, it is also the raw engagement with the passing seasonality of existence,

LONELINESS is the doorway to unspoken and yet unspecified desire.

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.

Loneliness is the substrate and foundation of belonging,

Loneliness is the place from which we pay real attention to voices other than our own; being alone allows us to find the healing power in the other.

Longing is divine discontent;

Longing is felt through the lens and ache of the body, magnifying and bringing the horizon close, as if the horizon were both a lifetime’s journey away and living deep inside at some unknown core

Longing has its own secret, future destination, and its own seasonal emergence from within, a ripening from the core, a seed growing in our own bodies;

Longing is nothing without its dangerous edge, which cuts and wounds us while setting us free, and beckons us exactly because of the human need to invite the right kind of peril.

MATURITY is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts,

to courageously inhabit the past, the present and the future all at once.

Immaturity is shown by making false choices: living only in the past, or only in the present, or only in the future, or even living only two out of the three.

real maturity can only be sustained by real silence, by a daily discipline of silence and an inhabitation of spaciousness, a foundational giving away.

Maturity is the discipline of giving up and giving away, to see what is left and what is real.

Memory is an invitation to the source of our life, to a fuller participation in the now, to a future about to happen, but ultimately to a frontier identity that holds them all at once. Memory makes the now fully inhabitable.

Robbed of our memory by Alzheimer’s or by a stroke, we lose our identities. Memory is the living link to personal freedom.

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.

NAMING love too early is a beautiful but harrowing human difficulty. Most of our heartbreak comes from attempting to name who or what we love, and the way we love, too early in the vulnerable journey of discovery.

We name mostly in order to control, but what is worth loving does not want to be held within the bounds of too narrow a calling.

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.

Pain asks us to heal by focusing not only on the place the pain is felt but also the actual way the pain is felt. Pain is a form of alertness and particularity; pain is a way in.

Pain’s beautiful humiliations make us naturally humble and force us to put aside the guise of pretence. In real pain we have no other choice but to learn to ask for help, and on a daily basis. Pain tells us we belong and cannot live forever alone or in isolation. Pain makes us understand reciprocation. In real pain we often have nothing to give back other than our own gratitude, a smile that perhaps looks half like a grimace or the passing friendship of the thankful moment to a helpful stranger, and pain can be an introduction to real friendship, it tests those friends we think we already have, but also introduces us to those who newly and surprisingly come to our aid.

We evolve as much with the parallel as we do with the present; as the years pass, our relationship to the path not taken or the person we did not pursue changes as much as it does with the one we did.

We are creatures made real through contact, meeting and then moving on; creatures who, saying hello and saying goodbye, strangely, never get to choose one above the other.

The defining experience at the diamond-hard centre of reality is eternal movement as beautiful and fearful invitation: a beckoning dynamic, asking us to move from this to that.

We are so much made of movement that we speak intuitively of the destination being both inside us and beyond us; we sense we are the journey along the way, the one who makes it and the one who has already arrived.

as Rilke said, ‘Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows, by being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings.’

REGRET is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word;

To admit regret is to understand we are fallible, that there are powers in the world beyond us; 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.