The thickest moments of grief, loneliness, isolation, failure, or whatever compounding feelings force us to kneel, curve inward, collapse in on ourselves like a circling ball, a form without entrance - remind me to drag up Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön’s beloved book on fear and falling apart: "What we're talking about is getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, and looking it right in the eye - not as a way to solve problems, but as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing." 

What if - Chödrön nudges gently - we pitch outward instead, extending ourselves to others in vulnerability? If we collapse, there should be no growth. There should be no healing.

The inadvertently painted sluice sink in the studio of my friend artist Mel Barrett. The drain shutters away colour and texture but keeps memories—a patina of effort and error.

What if we look at disappointment as an outcome of effort and error? David Whyte (Born November 2, 1955), a contemporary poet of timeless wisdom on the human spirit, argues to handle disappointment gently and approach it with courage, even curiosity. In Consolations, Whyte urges:

Disappointment is a friend to transformation; a call to both accuracy and generosity in the assessment of our self and others, a test of sincerity and a catalyst of resilience. Disappointment is just the initial meeting with the frontier of an evolving life, an invitation to reality, which we expected to be one particular and turns out to be another, often something more difficult, more overwhelming and strangely, in the end, more rewarding.

Whyte is a contemporary poet of Yorkshire and Irish heritage. He trained as a marine biologist and worked as a naturalist, becoming a poet and teacher in 1986 in his adopted United States.  Whyte has written poetry and prose that return meaning to everyday words. His take on disappointment, similar to Chödrön’s, turns a downward, inward-facing emotion into something light-facing and positive. Even suggesting emancipation and freedom.

What we call disappointment may be just the first stage of our emancipation into the next greater pattern of existence. To be disappointed is to reappraise not only reality itself but our foundational relationship to the pattern of events, places, and people that surround us, and which, until we were properly disappointed, we had misinterpreted and misunderstood; disappointment is the first, fruitful foundation of genuine heartbreak from which we risk ourselves in a marriage, in a work, in a friendship, or with life itself.

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

If disappointment is a "misunderstood mercy, " it demands courage and change, Whyte argues; it demands attention and care.

The measure of our courage is the measure of our willingness to embrace disappointment, to turn towards it rather than away, the understanding that every real conversation of life involves having our hearts broken somewhere along the way and that there is no sincere path we can follow where we will not be fully and immeasurably let down and brought to earth, and where what initially looks like a betrayal, eventually puts real ground under our feet.

The pattern of existence Whyte mentions is how we find ourselves unwittingly dealing with disappointment. We treat it as a threat, something that happens to us from an external entity, rather than something that comes from us. As a result, a sort of thrashing self arrives to defend against it; we become a hero with a sword - questing to arrive anywhere other than here, all the while slaying anything that reeks of disappointment—breaking down our self as we break down all around us.

Urban decay. Decay occurs when time throws itself against matter, and matter disappoints. Or does it? The elegance of decay. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Whyte's advice is to do the exact opposite. In the face of disappointment, slip into a tender, armed-open welcoming, self-evaluating, silent, thoughtful, and yes - vulnerable - pattern of existence. The goal is no longer to avoid disappointment or trade it into success but to yield to it and establish "real ground under our feet." The assuredness of disappointment rather than threat. Embrace the idea, if not the practice. Try it, perhaps be disappointed.  You are not alone: read more from Thích Nhất Hạnh's insight into the unique relationship between anger and gratitude, Toni Morrison on letting down those who lead us, and Susan Sontag on the limits of our empathy for ourselves and others.