Consolations (Kindle highlights)

The first step in spending time alone is to admit how afraid of it we are. (p. 3)
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. (p. 4)
One of the elemental dynamics of self-compassion is to understand our deep reluctance to be left to ourselves. (p. 5)
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 story from too small and too complicated a perspective. (p. 5)
Ambition may be essential for the young and as yet unrealised life, but becomes the essential obstacle of any mature life. Ambition abstracts us from the underlying elemental nature of the creative conversation while providing us the cover of a target that has become false through over-description, overfamiliarity or too much understanding. (p. 8)
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. (p. 9)
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. (p. 10)
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. (p. 14)
It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought: just picking up the pen or the wood chisel, just picking up the instrument or the phone, which is why we so often prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities to be safely clouded by fear, why we want the horizon to remain always in the distance, the promise never fully and simply made, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility. (p. 20)
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. (p. 23)
We are both: other people will never go away, and aloneness is both possible and necessary. (p. 24)
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. (p. 27)
Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive. (p. 33)
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. (p. 40)
Despair turns to depression and abstraction when we try to make it stay beyond its appointed season and start to shape our identity around its frozen disappointments. But despair can only stay beyond its appointed time through the forced artificiality of created distance, by abstracting ourselves from bodily feeling, by trapping ourselves in the disappointed mind, by convincing ourselves that the seasons have stopped and can never turn again, and perhaps, most simply and importantly, by refusing to let the body breathe by itself, fully and deeply. (p. 42)
The antidote to despair is not to be found in the brave attempt to cheer ourselves up with happy abstracts, but in paying a profound and courageous attention to the body and the breath, independent of our imprisoning thoughts and stories, even, surprisingly, in paying attention to despair itself, and the way we hold on to it, and which we realise was never ours to own and to hold in the first place. To see and experience despair fully in our body is to begin to see it as a necessary, seasonal visitation, and the first step in letting it have its own life, neither holding it nor moving it on before its time. (p. 44)
To be disappointed is to reappraise not only reality itself but our foundational relationship to the pattern of events, places and people that surround us, and which, until we were properly disappointed, we had misinterpreted and misunderstood; (p. 49)
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. (p. 50)
To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw centre, to reimagine our relation to it. (p. 52)
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. (p. 58)
Our hope to circumvent heartbreak in adulthood is beautifully and ironically childlike: heartbreak is as inescapable and inevitable as breathing, a part and a parcel of every path, asking for its due in every sincere course an individual takes. (p. 77)
After that, the need for continual help becomes more subtle, hidden as it is by the illusion that we are suddenly free agents able to survive on our own, the one corner of the universe able to supply its own answers. (p. 84)
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. (p. 105)
Nostalgia is the arriving waveform of a dynamic past, newly remembered and about to be re-imagined by a mind and a body at last ready to come to terms with what actually occurred. (p. 114)
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. (p. 115)
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. (p. 117)
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. (p. 130)
Fully experienced, regret turns our eyes, attentive and alert, to a future possibly lived better than our past. (p. 131)
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. (p. 135)
Only in maturity do we begin to understand that whatever citadel of thought or identity we have built and proudly displayed to others, whatever monuments to our achievements we attempt to leave behind, none of us know the true perspective with which we will be viewed or the way in which our memory will be enjoyed. (p. 141)
To want to run away is an essence of being human; it transforms any staying through the transfigurations of choice. To think about fleeing from circumstances, from a marriage, a relationship or from a work is part of the conversation itself and helps us understand the true distilled nature of our own reluctance, thus allowing us a deeper honesty about the cross-currents of our difficulty in being fully present. (p. 142)
Rarely is it good to run, though the rare times do sometimes prove the exception, but we are wiser, more present, more mature, more understanding when we realise we can never flee from the inner need to run away. (p. 144)
And above all, how will you shape a life equal to and as beautiful and as astonishing as a world that can birth you, bring you into the light, and then, just as you are beginning to understand it, take you away? (p. 161)
To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world; of weakness; a sign of fear rather than strength, and betrays a strange misunderstanding of an abiding, foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear. (p. 164)