After Despair comes hope
Despair is not a failure.
It is a season.
This essay, woven around David Whyte's poem of the same name, is for anyone who has lost the horizon and wonders if it will ever return.
Photo Credit: Vallerie Mwazo
I recently read and heard David Whyte’s poem Despair and it really moved me. It touched me and spoke to me in a way that made me realise my existence is not isolated or a unique experience. There are many different seasons in life, and the season of despair is quite difficult to understand.
There comes a point or points in life, where the season of despair becomes a companion, a temporary shelter from life; “a place where we hope nothing can ever find us in the same way again.’’* It is a season we experience when we feel that life has disappointed us, where the pain and wounds of our existence are laid bare, and the losses we have endured are magnified.
Despair is a season of quiet darkness, where we unravel from the seams to the core of our being, and the person we know, the wishes and dreams we have for life, quietly disappear, and the horizon of our vision, of our dreams, vanishes.
“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’ from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by:
David Whyte
What Whyte captures so poetically and beautifully in this poem is that despair is a necessary but temporary season in our lives. We need to get lost, lose hope, feel the weight of our existence, face the pain of lived and imagined beliefs, reckon with the ache of unmet hopes, grieve the futures we dreamed of but never realised and witness the barren landscapes of promises that life never kept.
We need the season of despair to remind us that this life is dichotomous, ephemeral, and ever-changing.
In despair, there is a sense of “why is this happening to me?”, a feeling that life is unfair and we are the victims of unfortunate circumstances. Whilst there is some truth to these statements, I think despair invites us to examine ourselves with unflinching honesty. It asks us to explore compassionately what within us continues to delay, to hinder our evolution and maturity.
Despair prompts us to recognise, perhaps for the first time, what has hurt us, where it has taken root, what injury our inner child has suffered, and how much of our sense of self has been stripped away in the process.
“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.”*
‘Despair’ from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by:
David Whyte
By embracing the temporality and spaciousness of despair, we grant ourselves the compassion of losing, surrendering, and the astute clarity of our most painful and fragmented pieces of being. Despair necessitates a brave honesty; it calls to us to remain awake amidst the chaos, to live through the darkness without retreating into illusions and stories that comfort us. The call of despair is at once a loss of hope and the last act 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.”*
The mould of ourselves that we are called to surrender and our old ways of living that are called to end, perhaps abruptly. Maybe we have acclimatised to the road of grief and loss and see the closure approaching. Whichever path we find ourselves traversing, despair comes as a last resort.
It announces, “ I can’t do this anymore.” “I can’t live like this anymore.” It appears like a warm, soothing hand that affirms us in our surrender, in our pain, and gently cocoons us in an ephemeral state of dulled pain and quiet. It is our old selves and the histories of pain and loss that accompany us that summon the season of despair. It is a season of passage and refuge, of necessary and beneficial transformation and metamorphosis that yields a new beginning.
In the refuge and darkness of despair, an opportunity arises to see life.
It offers us a “life in review,” a chance to understand why we are here.
Despair provides us with information about our life path.
It asks us to consider that maybe, just maybe, the lives we live and the lessons we learn were meant to be ours all along.
It suggests that maybe our experiences, however great or terrible, are not ours to possess but rather mediums in which we experience the totality of the human experience.
This does not suggest or prescribe to romanticising the suffering that occurs on our planet, nor does it encourage invalidating the pain that most in the world experience daily.
I cannot deny what I see with my eyes and heart. What I offer here is a personal reflection of my own lived experience, not a fantasy dreamt and idolised in beautiful words.
My life presented me with this opportunity, and has led me to a greater understanding of my journey here on earth. Not that I recognised it as such when I was in the midst of it all.
Part of my path is to give voice to the unknown and to name it, so that others might utilise it as a reference point, much like how David Whyte’s poem was a healing balm for me.
I believe this implies that if life bestows upon us any gift of wisdom, skill, or talent, it is not merely a blessing but a responsibility. These gifts render us as custodians who will not only nurture and refine them but also offer them in service of something greater than ourselves.
Our skills, talents, and gifts are given to us as promises that we will act conscientiously with them. They are not solely for exploitation or personal gain. No, such a misuse of divine inheritances would be wrong.
Despair poses the question, “ Are you only the sum of your loss, pain and grief?” “Are you really broken?” “Or was that a necessary point of departure, to ‘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 allows us to consider that maybe, just maybe, our greatest losses, pain and failures are agents of change that refine the old and unconscious within us, and by illuminating the darkness, our true essence glimmers brighter as well.
Not only does despair offer us hope, but it also offers us compassion for others. When we have walked to the depths of our grief and pain, we come to recognise its contours in others. We might not entirely understand their grief, but we know the terrain well enough to offer compassion and quiet understanding.
This form of validation is more powerful than anything else we offer each other; it communicates “I see you and hear you. I am with you in your loss.”
Despair challenges our self-perception. If we are not our pain and losses, then who are we? If the demanding and challenging experiences in our lives serve as mediums that awaken our consciousness, then who are we?
Who are we if the pain and the loss we experience in our lives serve as the alchemical fire onto which we gain understanding of compassion, of love, of kindness, of joy…. I believe despair is a season that transforms our greatest losses into strengths.
If we can remain honest in our season of despair, we can come to see that our pain and the stories that coalesce around it are shatterable.
We are not tethered to our pain and our loss, nor do they define who we are.
Our losses help our souls evolve beyond limiting and archaic consciousnesses that could span multiple generations or lifetimes. Our work, therefore, is to have courage and commit ourselves to the work before us. We may be the beneficiaries of our hard work, or we may accelerate the healing required for the next generation
Despair asks us to imagine ourselves as co-creators in this life. Life does not only happen to us, but rather we co-create with life with our actions and inaction. When the season of despair arrives, it signals that profound change is imminent and necessary to continue our dialogue with life and creation. Embrace your season of despair; hope awaits you on the other side.
The second and third images are sourced via Pinterest. All rights belong to the original creators.*All quotes from David Whyte's poem are italicised in the essay*You can find David Whyte's full poem in his book titled: CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. © David Whyte: REVISED EDITION Many Rivers Press 2020