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

by David Whyte

Maria Popova

Reading this thinking it sounds so much like Maria popova... and i get to the end and find the forward was written by her... loved that

To be alone for any length of time is to shed an outer skin. The body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others. Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.

It may be that time away from a work, an idea of ourselves, or a committed partner is the very essence of appreciation for the other, for the work and for the life of another; to be able to let them alone as we let ourselves alone, to live something that feels like a choice again, to find ourselves alone as a looked-for achievement, not a state to which we have been condemned.

No matter the self-conceited importance of our labours we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine. Ambition takes us toward that horizon, but not over it - that line will always recede before our controlling hands. But a calling is a conversation between our physical bodies, our work, our intellects and imaginations, and a new world that is itself the territory we seek. A vocation always includes the specific, heartrending way we will fail at our attempt to live fully. A true vocation always metamorphoses both ambition and failure into compassion and understanding for others.

ANGER is the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly, about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger points toward the purest form of compassion; 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.

But anger truly felt at its centre is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate, and the body larger and strong enough to hold it.

Beauty especially occurs in the meeting of time with the timeless; the passing moment framed by what has happened and what is about to occur: the scattering of the first spring apple blossom, the turning, spiralling flight of a curled leaf in the falling light; the smoothing of white sun-filled sheets by careful hands setting them to air on a line, the broad expanse of cotton filled by the breeze only for a moment, the sheets sailing on into dryness, billowing toward a future that is always beckoning, always just beyond us. Beauty is the harvest of presence.

Beginning is difficult, and our insulating rituals and the virtuoso subtleties of our methods of delay are always a fine, ever-present measure of our reluctance in taking that first close-in, courageous step to reclaiming the happiness of actually having started. Perhaps, because taking a new step always begins from the central, foundational core of the body, a body we have neglected, beginning well means seating ourselves in the body again, catching up with ourselves and the person we have become since we last tried to begin. This radical physical embodiment leads to an equally radical internal simplification, where, suddenly, very large parts of us, parts of us we have kept gainfully employed for years, parts of us still rehearsing the old complicated story, are suddenly out of a job.

We run a business while remembering, as the overhead grows, how the enterprise was originally our doorway to freedom.

Besieged as we are, little wonder that men and women alternate between the dream of a place apart, untouched by the world, and then wanting to be wanted again in that aloneness. 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 are both: other people will never go away, and aloneness is both possible and necessary.

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.

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything, except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on - and always has begged us on. To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.

Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.

On the inside we come to know who and what and how we love and what we can do to deepen that love; only from the outside, and only by looking back, does it look like courage.

Denial can be a beautiful skin shed, left to be seen, or even to beautify, and beatify others as they follow, wearing our former clothes. To understand the true nature of our reluctance through observing and then inhabiting our denial is to see directly into the soul’s wish to participate.

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 takes us in when we have nowhere else to go: when we feel the heart cannot break any more, when our world or our loved ones disappear, when we feel we cannot be loved or do not deserve to be loved, when our God disappoints, or when our body is carrying profound pain in a way that does not seem to go away.

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.

What we call disappointment may be just the first stage of our emancipation into the next greater pattern of existence.

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. Disappointment is just the initial meeting with the frontier of an evolving life, an invitation to reality, which we expected to be one particular way and turns out to be another, often something more difficult, more overwhelming and strangely, in the end, more rewarding.

Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses, as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn.

A diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armoured personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence.

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.

The full genius of gift-giving is found when we give what a person does not fully feel they deserve, but that does not overstretch the point; it is the appropriate but surprising next step in their lives. It disarms and moves and empowers all at once, while gratifying the one who gives beyond most everyday satisfactions.

The perfect gift may be tiny and inexpensive, but accompanied by a note that moves the recipient; the perfect gift may be enormous, extravagant, expensive and jaw-dropping as a courageous act of flamboyance and devil-may-care love, but 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. 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

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege, that we are miraculously part of something, rather than nothing.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort; this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege.

Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.

HAUNTED is a word that denotes an unresolved parallel, a presence that is not quite a presence; a visitation by the as yet unspeakable. It is also emblematic of the longing for incarnation, of an unbearable substrate of wanting, of not finding a home in this world or in the next, someone or something that walks the halls of our house or our mind looking for what will help to lay its own self to rest.

we become visible and real when we give our gift and stop waiting for the gift to be given to us. We wake into our lives again, as if for the first time, laying to rest what previously had no home, through beginning to speak, beginning to make real and beginning to live, those elements constellating inside us that long to move from the invisible to the visible.

Haunted

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

HELP is strangely something we want to do without, as if the very idea disturbs and blurs the boundaries of our individual endeavours, as if we cannot face how much we need in order to go on. We are born with an absolute necessity for help, grow well only with a continuous succession of extended hands, and as adults depend upon others for our further successes and possibilities in life even as competent individuals. Even the most solitary writer needs a reader, the most Machiavellian mobster a trusted lieutenant, the most independent candidate a voter.

HIDING is a way of staying alive. Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light. Hiding is one of the brilliant and virtuoso practices of almost every part of the natural world:

Hiding is an act of freedom from the misunderstanding of others,

Hiding is a bid for independence - from others, from mistaken ideas we have about ourselves, from an oppressive and mistaken wish to keep us completely safe, completely ministered to, and therefore completely managed.

Giving permission and validation to otherwise not so positive ways of being

Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.

HONESTY is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, with the world, or with our self. 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. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is, in effect, to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story, we do not know where we are in the story; we do not know who is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. Honesty is not a weapon to keep loss and heartbreak at bay; honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality, the hardest attainable ground of all, the place where we actually dwell. The living, breathing frontier, where there is no realistic choice between gain or loss.

Joy may be made by hard-won, practised achievement as much as by an unlooked for, passing act of grace arrived out of nowhere; joy, to our consternation, is a measure of our relationship to death and our living with death; joy is the act of giving ourselves away before we need to or are asked to; joy is practised generosity.

LONELINESS is the doorway to unspoken and yet unspecified desire. In the bodily pain of aloneness is the first step to understanding how far we are from a real friendship, from a proper work or a long-sought love. Loneliness can be a prison, a place from which we look out at a world we cannot inhabit; loneliness can be a bodily ache and a penance, but loneliness fully inhabited also becomes the voice that asks and calls for that great unknown someone or something we want to call our own.

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. The shortest line in the briefest e-mail can heal, embolden, welcome home and enliven the most isolated identity.

The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognised through a disciplined refusal to choose between or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity: what has happened, what only looks as if it is happening now, and what is about to occur. 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.

Nostalgia can feel like an indulgence, a sickness, an inundation by forces beyond us, but, strangely, forces that have also lived with us and within us all along. Nostalgia is not indulgence. Nostalgia tells us we are in the presence of imminent revelation, about to break through the present structures held together by the way we have remembered: something we thought we understood but that we are now about to fully understand; something already lived but not fully lived, issuing not from our future but from something already experienced; something that was important, but something to which we did not grant importance enough; something now wanting to be lived again, at the depth to which it first invited us but which we originally refused. 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.

Pain is the first proper step to real compassion; it can be a foundation for understanding all those who struggle with their existence. Experiencing real pain ourselves, our moral superiority comes to an end; we stop urging others to get with the programme, to get their act together or to sharpen up, and start to look for the particular form of debilitation, visible or invisible, that every person struggles to overcome. In pain, we suddenly find our understanding and compassion engaged as to why others may find it hard to fully participate.

When we speak of parallels, we speak therefore of accompanying possibilities, like a life or a partner we did not choose, the refusal of an uncertain other life influencing this certain and familiar present life. 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. 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.

someone who underneath it all doesn’t quite understand from whence they came or quite where they are going, and many times from where their next bite of bread will come; someone dependent on help from other strangers and from those who will meet them along the way. Travelling toward a place over the horizon, 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.

Pilgrim

Procrastination when studied closely can be a beautiful thing, a parallel with patience, a companionable friend; a revealer of the true pattern already, we are surprised to find, caught within us: acknowledging, for instance, as a writer, that before a book can be written, most of the ways it cannot be written must be tried first, in our minds - on the blank screen, on the empty page, or staring at the bedroom ceiling at four in the morning. Procrastination enables us to taste the single malt essence of our own reluctance.

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. And yet, strangely, to admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins.

Fully experienced, regret turns our eyes, attentive and alert, to a future possibly lived better than our past.

Regret