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

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. No matter our need to find a place to stand amidst the onward flow of the world, the real foundation of the self

To procrastinate is to be involved with larger entities than our own ideas, to refuse to settle for an early underachieving outcome and wrestle like Jacob with his angel, finding, as Rilke said, ‘Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows, by being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings.’

Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless.

Human beings are always, and always will be, a frontier between what is known and what is not known. The act of turning any part of the unknown into the known is simply an invitation for an equal measure of the unknown to flow in and re-establish that frontier: to reassert the far inward, as yet unknown horizon of an individual life; to make us wha

heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way. 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 it

Denial is an ever-present and even splendid thing when seen in the light of its merciful and elemental powers to cradle and hold an identity until it is ready to move on. Faced with the depth of loss and disappearance in the average life, a measure of denial is creative, necessary and self-compassionate:

Self-knowledge includes the understanding that the self we want to know is about to disappear. What we can understand is the way we occupy this frontier between the known and the unknown, the way we hold the conversation of life, the figure we cut at that edge, but a detailed audit of the self is not possible and diminishes us in the attempt to est

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.

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.

Pain is a form of alertness and particularity; pain is a way in.