Finding consolation in everyday words
In June 2025, I meditated alongside David Whyte’s poetry on the “meanings, paradoxes, and complexities of everyday words.” His essays moved me, but I regret how I went about the exercise.
Consolations, by David Whyte, is a course you can find on the Waking Up app, a very good philosophy-oriented meditation & spirituality app. The course itself is essentially the audio book version of a book of essays bearing the same name: Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. The essays are close to poems, at least when being read aloud by the author, and each audio clip in this series is one such poem.
In the introduction to the series, David Whyte explains the reasoning and creative process that birthed these essays. Through this explanation, we get the blueprint that, for our purpose, we can identify as a “philosophical exercise”. One that could be called “finding consolation in everyday words”.
David Whyte starts by explaining how he noticed that certain clichés prematurely shut down the potential of certain words to change our lives for the better. For instance, the word “Regret” is full of potential, because if you meditate on what you regret about the past, you can start to change the present and the future. Unfortunately, upon noticing the paradoxes inherent to certain words, we feel inclined to close down these words rather than open them up and let them nourish us. For instance, the phrase “I have no regrets” is some kind of thought-terminating spiritual cliché that prevents you from benefiting from the word. It’s all too easy, all too one-sided, to solve one’s relationship with “regret” by making a resolution of this kind, based on philosophical arguments, “having regrets is silly because good things come out of the bad, etc”… Sure… On the one hand, that’s true… But where’s your other hand? With two hands, two sides of the problem, perhaps you could hold and tend to the heart-break a little while longer and see what comes through. Heart-break is a big theme in this series of poems. As Leonard Cohen says “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in”.
A major through-line of this series is some kind of ethos that I am tempted to call “mindful existentialism”. The essay called “Close” embodies it well. Telling us that “close”, close to succeeding, close to reaching the destination, is, in a sense, the closest we ever get. “Ever get to what?” you might ask. To everything. Arrival is always implied by the arc of our projects, and yet we are fundamentally stuck in the middle. It’s the journey, not the destination, as they say. And we have to learn to be okay with that. We are stuck in this situation, and it isn’t so bad.
With those big themes of heart-break and closeness, as well as with other big themes of vocational pursuit and flourishing, the poet ends up rehabilitating a lot of things that we tend to deem as unworthy and to push aside. Like “regret”, like “aloneness”, even things you would think are necessarily bad, like “denial” or “ambition”.
The poems/essays are more or less conversational. When they are read aloud by the author, they sound more like poems (and the author does not hesitate to repeat certain sentences), and when they are read in silence they look more like essays, observations in prose. Let me show you, for example, how David Whyte deals with “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…"
I think some of those poems will stay with me for a long time. But in the short term, this philosophical exercise felt a bit unfruitful to me. It’s not the poems’ fault though. Where things went wrong, I think, is that I passively consumed this content, and I did not take out my journal to write things down and emulate how David Whyte was practising his poetry. So what ended up happening is that I listened to those audios, those poems, and they worked on me, they truly felt like a spiritual resource, BUT as soon as I stopped listening to them, I went back to the rest of my life and I didn’t carry this nourishment with me. I mostly forgot about it. And predictably, I dropped out and ended up not listening to all the poems. When all was said and done, I felt pretty silly for having “forgotten” to “actually practice” the philosophical exercise… I guess, if I had to criticize this Consolations series itself, I would say that an explicit invitation to write, to do some creative writing, would have gone a long way to prevent this experience from being merely “entertaining” and not well “integrated” with the rest of my life. Sure I should have remembered to do the work (philosophy is my job), but reminders are still nice :p
But I don't think the series was to blame for my lack of motivation. This was a difficult month when it comes to my spiritual training. Between the high temperatures and the loss of Helen de Cruz, it’s been difficult to be motivated to do anything. I dragged my heels when it came to writing this blog post, but I reminded myself that reporting on negative results of little experiments like this is still pretty valuable. This negative result is a big lesson for me, though it is a simple one: Journal, Journal, Journal. Put pen to paper. Most philosophical exercises require it. In this case, I should have written myself some of that intimate phenomenologically-minded poetry. At least tried to.
This all reminds me of (what was heavy on my mind already) an anecdote about Helen de Cruz at the end of their life. The author of this blog post recounts a conversation they had with Helen: “When we started to discuss the end, I expected a meditative turn. But our last most serious chat was focused on the nature of ambition. Instead, Helen threw herself in more work, including organizing the posthumous reception. They knew I had studied how Hume and Smith, and Spinoza and his circle had organized this and we discussed it without shame.”
A lot of us noticed the same thing. In the end, Helen de Cruz wrote a lot about ambition; writing a manifesto, organizing their legacy, etc. How much poorer would all of us have been if they didn’t take the time to do so? “Ambition” is such an everyday word, easy to skip over. David Whyte has a great poem about the ease and unease of ambition. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if Whyte’s and De Cruz’s views of ambition align. That’s not the point. What matters is the stubborn philosophical refusal to engage only superficially with “ambition”, only to completely dismiss it out of hand or to embrace it uncritically, as if the case was obviously closed from the start. It is also a stubborn philosophical refusal to engage in what you deem to be easy and false consolation after a moment of reflection. You have to wrestle with everyday words, accept the heartbreak, embrace the paradox, and find a way to move forward with it.
I find it all so fascinating: the way "consolation" - and, mind you, the point of Philosophy as a Way of Life and philosophical exercises is to make one consolable - the way "consolation" is always entangled in a relationship with its moments of failures, with all the moments when we find ourselves inconsolable.
(PS: On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. For example, last time, I explored Modern Postural Yoga and finally managed to develop the sense of sky that had eluded me for so long. Another time, I practiced Jhana meditation and experienced mind-blowing effects, unlike anything I had ever experienced in meditation. Take a look around the blog for more exercises!)
(17/07/2025)
Pierrick Simon
my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr
(do not hesitate to reach out)
Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social
Twitter: @PhiloTranquille
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