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

by David Whyte

Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness,’ he writes of a word so hollowed in our era of social media ‘friends’, in our culture so conditioned on unforgiving cynicism and distracted flight from presence.

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. 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.

One of the elemental dynamics of self-compassion is to understand our deep reluctance to be left to ourselves.

Aloneness begins in puzzlement at our own reflection, transits through awkwardness and even ugliness at what we see, and culminates, one appointed hour or day, in a beautiful unlooked-for surprise, at the new complexion beginning to form, the slow knitting together of an inner life, now exposed to air and light.

To be alone is not necessarily to be absent from the company of others; the radical step is to let ourselves alone, to cease the berating voice that is constantly trying to interpret and force the s...

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. We find that, all along, we had what we needed from the beginning and that in the end we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had experienced the actual heartbreak of the journey.

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.

Ambition is natural to the first steps of youth, who must experience its essential falsity to know the larger reality that stands behind it, but held on to too long, and especially in eldership, it always comes to lack surprise, turns the last years of the ambitious into a second childhood, and makes the once successful into an object of pity.

Perhaps the greatest legacy we can leave from our work is not to instil ambition in others, though this may be the first way we describe its arrival in our life, but the passing on of a sense of sheer privilege, of having found a road, a way to follow, and then having been allowed to walk it, often with others, with all its difficulties and minor triumphs; the underlying primary gift of having been both a witness to and a full participant in the conversation.

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.

Beauty is the harvest of presence.

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.

Being besieged asks us to begin the day not with a to do list but a not to do list, a moment outside of the time-bound world in which it can be reordered and reprioritised. In this space of undoing and silence we create a foundation from which to re-imagine our day and ourselves.

both familiar and strangely surprising. 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.

We are, in effect, always close, always close to the ultimate secret: that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach; the step between not understanding that and understanding that is as close as we get to happiness.

Denial is a beautiful transitional state every human being inhabits before they are emancipated into the next, larger context and orphaned, often against their will, from their old and very familiar home.

to deny denial is to invite powers into our lives we have not yet readied ourselves to meet.

We give up hope when certain particular wishes are no longer able to come true and despair is the time in which we both endure and heal, even when we have not yet found the new form of hope.

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.

DISAPPOINTMENT is inescapable but necessary; a misunderstood mercy and, when approached properly, an agency for transformation and the hidden, underground engine of trust and generosity in a human life.

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

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.

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

Through the eyes of a friend we especially learn to remain at least a little interesting to others.

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long, close relationship with another, 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.

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.

Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the colour blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.

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.

fear of ghosts, or a fear of our own haunted mind, is the measure of our absence in this world.

and finally, even the most self-compassionate self-examination should, if we are sincere, lead eventually to existential disappointment.

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.

Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light.

We live in a time of the dissected soul, the immediate disclosure: our thoughts, imaginings and longings exposed to the light too much, too early and too often; our best qualities squeezed too soon into a world already awash with ideas that oppress our sense of self and our sense of others.

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.

But the present fashionable obsession with living only in the now misunderstands the multi-layered inheritance of existence, where all epochs live and breathe in parallels.

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.

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

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.

Physical 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, refusing to go away.

Pain teaches us a fine economy, in movement, in the heart’s affections, in what we ask of ourselves, and eventually in what we ask in others.

Lastly, pain is appreciation for, most of all, the simple possibility and gift of a pain-free life – all the rest is a miraculous bonus. Others do not know the gift in simply being healthy, of being unconsciously free to move or walk or run.

The great measure of the pilgrim journey of human maturation is the increasing understanding that we move through life in the blink of an eye; that we are not long with the privilege of having eyes to see, ears to hear, a voice with which to speak and arms to put round a loved one; that we are simply passing through.

But if we are all movement, exchange and getting to know, where a refusal to move on makes us unreal, we are also journeymen and journeywomen, with an unstoppable need to bring our skills and experience, our voice and our presence to good use in the eternal now we visit along the way.

PROCRASTINATION is not what it seems. What looks from the outside like our delay, our lack of commitment, even our laziness, may have more to do with a slow, necessary ripening through time, and the central struggle with the realities of any endeavour to which we have set our minds.

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

Procrastination helps us to be a student of our own reluctance, to understand the hidden darker side of the first enthusiastic idea, to learn what we are afraid of in the endeavour itself; to put an underbelly into the work itself so that it becomes a living, satisfying whole, not a surface trying to manipulate us in the moment.

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