20/03/2023
DESPAIR
takes us in when we have nowhere else to go; when we feel the heart cannot break anymore, when our world or our loved ones disappear, when we feel we cannot be loved or do not deserve to be loved, when our God disappoints, when our world disappoints, or when our body is carrying profound pain in a way that does not seem to go away.
Despair is a haven with its own temporary form of beauty and of self -compassion, it is the invitation we accept when we want to remove ourselves from hurt. Despair, is a last protection. To disappear through despair, is to seek a temporary but necessary illusion, a place where we hope nothing can ever find us in the same way again.
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; it is a loss of horizon, it is the place we go when we do not want to be found in the same way anymore. 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.
Despair is strangely, the last bastion of hope; the wish being, that if we cannot be found in the old way we cannot ever be touched or hurt in that way again.
Despair is the sweet but illusory abstraction of leaving the body while still inhabiting it, so we can stop the body from feeling anymore. Despair is the place we go when we no longer want to make a home in the world and where we feel, with a beautifully cruel form of satisfaction, that we may never have deserved that home in the first place. Despair, strangely, has its own sense of achievement, and despair, even more strangely, needs despair to keep it alive.
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 its self, fully and deeply. Despair is kept alive by freezing our sense of time and the rhythms of time; when we no longer feel imprisoned by time, and when the season is allowed to turn, despair cannot survive.
To keep despair alive we have to abstract and immobilize our bodies, our faculties of hearing, touch and smell, and keep the surrounding springtime of the world at a distance. Despair needs a certain tending, a reinforcing, and isolation, but the body left to itself will breathe, the ears will hear the first birdsong of morning or catch the leaves being touched by the wind in the trees, and the wind will blow away even the grayest cloud; will move even the most immovable season; the heart will continue to beat and the world, we realize, will never stop or go away.
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, in paying attention to despair itself, and the way we hold it, and which we realize, 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.
We take the first steps out of despair by taking on its full weight and coming fully to ground in our wish not to be here. We let our bodies and we let our world breathe again. In that place, strangely, despair cannot do anything but change into something else, into some other season, as it was meant to do, from the beginning.
Despair is a difficult, beautiful necessary; a binding understanding between human beings caught in a fierce and difficult world where half of our experience is mediated by loss, but it is a season, a wave form passing through the body, not a prison surrounding us. A season left to itself will always move, however slowly, under its own patience, power and volition.
Refusing to despair about despair itself, we can let despair have its own natural life and take a first step onto the foundational ground of human compassion, the ability to see and understand and touch and even speak, the heartfelt grief of another.
…
‘DESPAIR’
From CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning
of Everyday Words
Revised Edition © David Whyte
and Many Rivers Press 2022
…
A Sunday in December
Photo © David Whyte
Cassey Compton, Cotswolds
December 4th 2016
..
AN AFTERWORD ON DESPAIR
I am not a despairing person, and certainly, in the buoyancy of my present days I feel very, very far from that apparent state of giving in and giving up, but it was not too long ago, telephone pressed against my ear, in the late night anonymity of a hotel room, hearing of the sudden loss of a close friend, that I felt the quiet hand of despair rest on my shoulder as she turned me resolutely to look her full in the face. In that giving over I felt for just a very few moments as if I had on my tongue, the unadulterated and unwanted pure malt taste of devastation and despair. It was a kind of fainting, and indeed I found myself a moment later, kneeling against the bed. I was astonished at the physical nature of the prostration, as if the body needed to give up holding its own weight, as if it simply couldn’t hold its own weight anymore, as if it demanded to fall against something other than its own self; the way the forehead, that outer representation of the way we lead ourselves in thought, resting against the covers, simply did not want to be the one leading my thinking or knowing anymore.
I was even more astonished to feel in that depth, how much of a different form of shelter and care waits for us beneath the outer forms of giving up, how that hand on the shoulder becomes a hand around the shoulder, and how a strange and marvelous mercy becomes available to us only in our sheer vulnerability, as if in stopping a certain way of holding the world I could allow myself to be held myself, in a different way. Despair it seems, asks for its own difficult form of faith, extends its hand in a form of friendship we do not at first comprehend. It is as if as human beings, no matter its outward form, we find it impossible to live in the world without some sense of home; that even in despair we are able to find another beautiful form of shelter, a home at the core when all outer homes seem to have been stolen away. DW
