David Whyte, a poet by trade, unpacks the meaning behind commonly used words and, certainly, for some of them, his interpretation made a mark on me, seeing the word in a new light and offering a new positive perspective on various emotions that we face and vainly try to avoid.I particularly liked his chapter on “Shadow”, and here is a paragraph from it;

To live with our shadow is to understand how human beings live at a frontier between light and dark, and to approach the central difficulty: that there is no possibility of a lighted perfection in this life; that the attempt to create it is often the attempt to be held unaccountable, to be the exception, to be the one who does not have to be present or participate, and therefore does not have to hurt or get hurt. To cast no shadow on others is to vacate the physical consequences of our appearance in the world.

Moreover, his musings on the word “Beginning” also remain in my mind, where to start, or to begin, is usually something less miraculous and simpler than what we expect it to be; it requires only, for instance, the movement of our hands to pick up a pen to begin writing or to start playing a musical instrument. Instead, we usually plant our ideas for beginning firmly in the future, in the “horizon” as David says, “always in the distance”.