Living Well Is Being Infinitely Kind and Forgiving

I don't think this quote was meant in the way I'm applying it today. I'm pretty sure he had a more political, social, and cultural context in mind. It's certainly what I was thinking when I read and saved it. Still, the book I want to share today is all about the meanings of words, so it fits.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.

― Philip K. Dick

(better citation)

With this post, I'd like to share a generous selection of highlights from the book Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte. I appreciate the way he manipulates words to convey a philosophy of life.

Previously, in The Enemy Is Blindness to Each Other's Ways, I shared a snippet of his definition of the word "Friendship" from that book.

The ultimate touchstone of friendship 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.

I don't remember where I found that quote, but it made me want to read the whole book. Now I have. Here's what I wrote for my review:

A collection of meditations on the deeper meanings of certain words. Whyte's definitions are all complex and slippery. Nearly every one creates an understanding of the word that includes its opposite, that puts the two in precarious balance with each other. Every one includes some measure of ambivalence that it tries to subtly resolve. They are all abstract. And Whyte's writing flows from phrase to phrase in a cascade of tiny refinements to his main idea about each word, never quite settling, always moving. They make perfect sense when you're in the midst of them, but are hard to describe after you are through. They are slippery. And--when you are able to hold on to them--they are profound, wise, and deeply insightful.

Whyte's themes inform his form. Flowing through all of them is a sense of life's essential ambiguity, that living is a constant, ambivalent muddle through different feelings and states, that we are limited and finite and flawed, vulnerable and hurt, joyful and sad, all the time, always at the same time. Of accepting and embracing it. Living well is being infinitely kind and forgiving, of both ourselves and others.

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Rather than trying to describe further, I'll share a few snippets. Each definition essay runs a few pages; these are mere highlights for each.

A core theme of compassionately accepting imperfection and vulnerability runs through all of these:

Vulnerability

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

Courage

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, as 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.

Honesty

Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.

Pain

Pain is the first proper step to real compassion; it can be a foundation for understanding all those who struggle with their existence. . . . In pain, we suddenly find our understanding and compassion engaged as to why others may find it hard to fully participate.

Despair

Despair is a necessary and seasonal state of repair, a temporary healing absence, an internal physiological and psychological winter when our previous forms of participation in the world take a rest. . . . 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.

Anger

Anger is the deepest form of compassion, 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 is the purest form of care.

Robustness

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.

Friendship

The ultimate touchstone of friendship 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.

More about Friendship in a bit.

I like the tension of the balance he describes here.

Beauty

Beauty is an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting; the self-forgetting of seeing, hearing, smelling or touching that erases our separation, our distance, our fear of the other. Beauty invites us, through entrancement, to that fearful frontier between what we think makes us; and what we think makes the world.

I have always been a procrastinator, but in exactly the sense he describes here. I wait because I am not yet ready, and know if I give myself more time I will be more ready later. It's a willingness to be patient until the time is best.

Procrastination

Procrastination is not always what it seems. To see procrastination as undesirable, especially in the initial stages of an endeavor is to say that Job was procrastinating by wrestling with his angel; that a woman feeling her first birth pangs should simply get on with it; that a bud should be broken open to reveal the full glory of the flower. 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 endeavor to which we have set our minds. To hate our procrastinating tendencies is in some way to hate our relationship with time itself, to be unequal to the phenomenology of revelation and the way it works its own way in its very own gifted time, only emerging when the very qualities it represents have a firm correspondence in our necessarily struggling heart and imagination.

Denial

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.

Hiding

What is real is almost always to begin with, hidden, and does not want to be understood by the part of our mind that mistakenly thinks it knows what is happening. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

Denial and Hiding convey that same sense of the necessity of patience. Life takes time.

Regret also conveys a respect for time. The maturity and wisdom that come with age.

Regret

Except for brief senses of having missed a tide, having hurt another, having taken what is not ours, youth is not yet ready for the rich current of abiding regret that runs through and emboldens a mature human life.

Sincere regret may in fact be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, for experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own. 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.

Negative feelings aren't really negative, but necessary and part of growth.

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Whyte has three essays that I think are too good to simply pull highlights. I included my own little meditation on anger a couple weeks ago in Turning Trolls Into People. The essence of my thoughts match what follows, but Whyte says it better.

ANGER

is the deepest form of compassion, 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 is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body's incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.

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. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.

Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability; anger too often finds its voice strangely, through our incoherence and through our inability to speak, but anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics: a daughter, a house, a family, an enterprise, a land or a colleague. 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 - we are often abused or have been abused by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry its understanding, or who have no outer emblems of their inner care or even their own wanting to be wanted. Lacking any outer vehicle for the expression of this inner rawness they are simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love's vulnerability. 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 center 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. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence.

As one of my friends said in Turning Trolls Into People, anger is a secondary emotion.

When I read the entry for Besieged, I felt seen. Understood. It gave words to an ever-present feeling.

BESIEGED

is how most people feel most of the time: by events, by people, by all the necessities of providing, parenting or participating and even by the creative possibilities they have set in motion themselves, and most especially, a success they have achieved through long years of endeavor.

To feel crowded, set upon, blocked by circumstances, in defeat or victory, is not only the daily experience of most human beings in most contemporary societies; it has been an abiding dynamic of individual life since the dawn of human consciousness. In a human life there is no escape from commitment: retreat to a desert island and the lonely islander will draw up a Robinson Crusoe list to make the place habitable or begin building a raft to escape; tell everyone to go away and they hang around wanting to know why. Earn a great deal of money to gain individual freedom and a whole world moves in for a share of the harvest.

As creatures we define ourselves through belonging or not belonging, we cannot help but make commitments to people, places and things, which then come looking for us. Conscious or unconscious, we are surrounded not only by the vicissitudes of a difficult world but even more by those of our own making.

If the world will not go away then the great discipline seems to be the ability to make an identity that can live in the midst of everything without feeling beset. 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 reprioritized. In this space of undoing and silence we create a foundation from which to re-imagine our day and ourselves. Beginning the daily conversation from a point of view of freedom and being untethered, allows us to re-see ourselves, to reenter the world as if for the first time. We give ourself and our accomplishments, our ambitions and our over-described hopes away, in order to see in what form they return to us.

To lift the siege, we do our best for our children but then, at the right time, send them off with a blessing, no matter their perilous direction. We run a business while remembering, as the overhead grows, how the enterprise was originally our doorway to freedom. We celebrate success but realize that another horizon now beckons, that we have in effect to start again, many times over. To get the measure of our success, we learn to call for an intimate close-in interiority, rather than a hoped for, unattainable, far and away.

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.

Creating a state of aloneness in the besieged everyday may be one of the bravest things individual men and women can do for themselves. Nel mezzo, in the midst of everything, as Dante said, to be besieged - but beautifully, because we have made a place to stand - in the people and the places and the perplexities we have grown to love, seeing them not now as enemies or forces laying siege, but as if for the first time, as participants in the drama, both familiar and strangely surprising. We find that having people knock on our door is as a much a privilege as it is a burden; that being seen, being recognized and being wanted by the world and having a place in which to receive everyone and everything, is infinitely preferable to its opposite.

I felt the same way watching Encanto with my kids when we came to the song "Surface Pressure."

Under the surface

I feel berserk as a tightrope walker in a three-ring circus

Under the surface

Was Hercules ever like, “Yo, I don’t wanna fight Cerberus”?

Under the surface

I’m pretty sure I’m worthless if I can’t be of service

Pressure like a grip, grip, grip, and it won’t let go, whoa

Pressure like a tick, tick, tick, ’til it’s ready to blow, whoa-oh-oh

Give it to your sister and never wonder

If the same pressure would’ve pulled you under

Who am I if I don’t have what it takes?

No cracks, no breaks

No mistakes, no pressure

One of my greatest pleasures is hiking through the woods where I can feel entirely isolated and alone.

Bringing things full circle, back to what caught my interest in the book, I think if there's one single essay that best captures the ideas behind all of Whyte's definitions, it's the one for Friendship.

FRIENDSHIP

is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. 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 friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.

In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.

Through the eyes of a real friendship an individual is larger than their everyday actions, and through the eyes of another we receive a greater sense of our own personhood, one we can aspire to, the one in whom they have most faith. Friendship is a moving frontier of understanding not only of the self and the other but also, of a possible and as yet unlived, future.

Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationship: it can transform a troubled marriage, make honorable a professional rivalry, make sense of heartbreak and unrequited love and become the newly discovered ground for a mature parent-child relationship.

The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: 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 armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence.

Through the eyes of a friend we especially learn to remain at least a little interesting to others. When we flatten our personalities and lose our curiosity in the life of the world or of another, friendship loses spirit and animation; boredom is the second great killer of friendship. Through the natural surprises of a relationship held through the passage of years we recognize the greater surprising circles of which we are a part and the faithfulness that leads to a wider sense of revelation independent of human relationship: to learn to be friends with the earth and the sky, with the horizon and with the seasons, even with the disappearances of winter and in that faithfulness, take the difficult path of becoming a good friend to our own going.

Friendship transcends disappearance: an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way even after one half of the bond has passed on.

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.

That describes an orientation I try to bring to all my relationships: friendship, love, professional, and the rest. And with myself. Patience and forgiveness; an awareness that we are all flawed, limited, and finite. Infinite kindness.