★★★★★ | Philosophy | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Ah, what a treasure. Two to three page poetic essays on 52 commonplace words or themes like Curiousity, Heartbreak, and Forgivness. I’ve been ruminating on this definition of Beauty for the past month:
Beauty is the harvest of presence.
Whyte often shared a take that surprised me, and sometimes changed my very paradigm of a long-fixed, but one-sided belief. I can see spending a year with this book, one theme per week, and digging deep, deep, deep into the purpose of life. This one is a permanent addition to my bedside table.
Highlights
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. (Page 10)
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. (Page 14)
Beauty is the harvest of presence. (Page 18) Being Present
Faced with the depth of loss and disappearance in the average life, a measure of denial is creative, necessary and self-compassionate: children are not meant to know they are one day to die and older adults are not meant to tell them. Refusing to face what we are not yet ripe and ready to face can help us to live through the more than enough difficulties of the present. (Page 38)
The great question in disappointment is whether we allow it to bring us to ground, to a firmer sense of our self, a surer sense of our world, and what is good and possible for us in that world, or whether we experience it only as a wound that makes us retreat from further participation. (Page 50)
Forgiveness is a skill, a way of preserving clarity, sanity and generosity in an individual life, a beautiful question and a way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves; an admittance that if forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing. (Page 53)
Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege, that we are miraculously part of something, rather than nothing. (Page 68)
Loneliness is the place from which we pay real attention to voices other than our own; being alone allows us to find the healing power in the other. (Page 101)
The great measure of the pilgrim journey of human maturation is the increasing understanding that we move through life in the blink of an eye; that we are not long with the privilege of having eyes to see, ears to hear, a voice with which to speak and arms to put round a loved one; that we are simply passing through. (Page 123)
Procrastination when studied closely can be a beautiful thing, a parallel with patience, a companionable friend; a revealer of the true pattern already, we are surprised to find, caught within us: acknowledging, for instance, as a writer, that before a book can be written, most of the ways it cannot be written must be tried first, in our minds on the blank screen, on the empty page, or staring at the bedroom ceiling at four in the morning. Procrastination enables us to taste the single malt essence of our own reluctance. (Page 128)
What is worthwhile carries the struggle of the maker written within it, but wrought into the shape of an earned understanding. (Page 128)