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

by David Whyte

REST is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.

The template of rest is the natural exchange of the body breathing, the autonomic giving and receiving that forms the basis and the measure of life itself.

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.

Rested, we are ready for the world but not held hostage by it; rested, we care again for the right things and the right people in the right way. In rest we re-establish the goals that make us more generous, more courageous, more of an invitation, someone we want to remember, and someone others would want to remember too.

ROBUSTNESS is a word denoting health, psychological or physical; the ability to meet the world with vigour and impact.

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

Robustness and vulnerability belong together. To be robust is to show a willingness to take collateral damage, to put up with temporary pain, noise, chaos, or our systems being temporarily undone. 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.

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

The city of the eternal is actually the city that most celebrates the insubstantiality of human striving.

To 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.

Wanting to run is necessary; actual running can save our lives at crucial times, but it can also be extremely dangerous and unwise,

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.

Half of what lies in the heart and mind is potentiality, resides in the darkness of the unspoken and unarticulated and has not yet come into being;

We are neither what we think we are nor entirely what we are about to become, we are neither purely individual nor fully a creature of our community, but an act of becoming that can never be held in place by a false form of nomenclature.

SHADOW does not exist by itself: it is cast, by a real, physical body.

Shadow is shaped by presence; presence comes a priori to our flaws and absences. To change the shape of ourselves is to change the shape of the shadow we cast. To become transparent is to lose one’s shadow altogether, something we often desire in the spiritual abstract but actually something that is not attainable by human beings

To live with our shadow is to understand how human beings live at a frontier between light and dark, and to approach the central difficulty: that there is no possibility of a lighted perfection in this life; that the attempt to create it is often the attempt to be held unaccountable, to be the exception, to be the one who does not have to be present or participate, and therefore does not have to hurt or get hurt.