I made a dumb decision once in a baseball game. The score was tied after I’d doubled in a run, and I took a generous lead off second base, pledging to score if a hit cleared the infield. The next batter blooped a single into shallow left, and I didn’t think twice before churning for home.
Josh, I'm struck for far from the first time, given our disparate origins and upbringings, by our commonalities. That needn't be so, so it offers no absolutely comforting universal, but it pleases me in its possibility and, of course, more personally, makes me happy for us.
As I was approaching the end of the essay, the thought, in satisfaction, just naturally arose that this is a perfect essay. How it naturally evolved in its not necessary parts from its more general consideration to a more specific focus on loss of your marriage to your creative life. It's all right and true even in its uncertainties.
I first entered psychotherapy at 17 in response to specific problems in my life, a more general one being chronic depression. I left after a couple of years feeling neither dissatisfied with the experience (I'd gained some genuine self-knowledge and been listened to by someone trained to listen in a particular way) nor feeing I was *healed*. I wasn't. I'm still not. But I thought I could go and live on my own. I returned to therapy off and on over my life, always because of particular problems in my life I felt the need to talk through. I did a lot of that also with very close friends I trusted no more than my therapist to reveal *the truth* to me but who I thought could offer me valuable perspectives to consider. They did. My last therapist I saw off and on -- mostly off! -- for thirty years. I spent a couple of years with him last almost a decade ago when I, again, faced a particular problem in my life. Near the end, after his having recognized the direction It seemed very reasonably clear to himI wanted to go, and working then to help me get there, he reacted in vocal astonishment one day when he realized I was going to go the other way! We recently communicated in writing after his retirement, and I told him how things are in my life now. He was pleased and said he thought we'd done good work together over the years. I agreed. He didn't heal me. I wasn't healed. But talking with him, a trained and uniquely insightful person, helped me get through better than if I hadn't.
You end, so well:
"I have to trust my own curiosity. It’s the idea that teases my mind over days and weeks, the question that feels urgent to me, the ritual with a quirky history that guides my course.
"That’s not doing the work. That’s just love. Can trusting that love be enough?"
I'm going to say it's close to enough. It has to be. And that can still include, in the better instances, when the dice fall the right way, someone to love and trust and talk to.
Thank you, Jay -- for reading and for sharing so much of your own experience. I hope I have qualified my points enough to show that I'm not rejecting therapy wholesale. As you say, I've gained some useful insights into my past and some new vocabulary that has been occasionally helpful.
Great musings! From a slightly different perspective, you're identifying how our culture of commodification and addiction--they go hand in hand--leaves you empty, sucked dry. The answer from our institutions is always "the work is never done; you need more, much more, of this; see you next time; swipe or insert here." Trusting yourself is never a legitimate answer, because then you wouldn't be spending the time/energy/money on whoever's selling you this product that you absolutely *have* to have in order to survive another day.
So, a good and healthy response to this is realizing that this is a scam. (Although a line has to be drawn between self-knowledge and knowledge of, say, the physical world. Because a blanket version is this is how we end up with people rejecting hundreds of years of research into, say, global warming or evolution and relying on themselves.) Focus on yourself and what you can intuit and comprehend without the use of middleman mediators. *You* are the expert of your own life, you're living it.
I propose that there's a still better answer.
When you rebel from the middleman scammers, then it's easily framed as You vs. The Scammers. And the energy you once invested in trusting the experts, becomes invested in the You. Very binary.
But what if life isn't all about the You, after all?
Being all wrapped up in the You is only some improvement beyond being all tied up by the 'experts' of your life. What if you could be not-all-wrapped-up in either one?
This isn't an altar call for a particular belief system. My favorite poet John Keats, not a subscriber to any religion, embodied it as well as anyone I've ever known, at least in his writings. Perhaps the Rationalist's Curse's antidote is the Empath's Embrace of the other?
One of my favorite lines in any film is from the French-Canadian socialist/atheist Denys Arcand's "Jésus de Montréal" from 1989. At the end of the thoroughly heretical Passion Play that is at the heart of the film, the character who seems to represent the Apostle John says to the baffled-but-intrigued small audience on the mountain in Montréal:
John, you anticipate a question I've been carrying for a while but haven't found the right frame to write about, namely, how to find the proper balance between questioning scams (or other forms of upselling) without lapsing into the climate denial, anti-vaxxer camp. It's tough. I am aware that many professionals that I ought to trust, like dentists and the vet where I take my cats, are trained to offer unessential services as add-ons. I see this model in entrepreneurship circles, too. Sifting through the information and drawing independent conclusions is necessary, but it's discouraging that it's increasingly necessary within institutions that I once trusted with less skepticism.
To your final point, this is the upshot of Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." Caring for others is the way out of Ivan's misery. But that can also be a recipe for burnout. And Ilyich doesn't live very long after his revelation, so he doesn't have to sustain it over years. I do embrace the necessity of self-care, so perhaps I've adopted some of the language of therapy, after all.
How to be skeptical without being a flake: a tough task in subjects you aren't yourself an expert in. Even in my own discipline, I've had to iterate a bit over the years on, yes, global warming. Human institutions are flawed, even those that have some self-correcting aspects to them (e.g., science). In general what I do is read the evidence, listen to tone, watch out for logical fallacies and other tip-offs that the speaker is loading the dice, think about the reasonableness of the position, do some additional reading, and I also watch to see if the speaker ultimately seems to have a personal stake/vendetta etc. that biases their view. It's a version of close reading, I suppose?
Excellent point with the Tolstoy reference. I think of Keats's oft-misunderstood "When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be" in response. Our culture, which I think of as quite rooted in the Romantic perspective of self and self-consciousness etc., is focused on self-help, self-this, self-that. The self is what matters. But... what was Keats's own thought in the poem about ceasing to be, never getting to do all the things that he could do (write, love, etc.), perhaps with an anticipation of burnout over caring for sick relatives and overworking in crap jobs to support his relatives in Louisville, KY? What does he say at the end?:
"then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink."
In other words, and I think this is a very radical thought in our time: what if our self, the big You as I framed it earlier... our great dreams and visions of greatness and our hoped-for attainment of equilibrium and emergence from the web of therapy and into that great new time we imagine...
...what if that doesn't really matter? What if all of it sinks to nothingness in the final analysis?
Paradoxically, is it possible that the *only* way to attain those things is by giving up on them, letting them go as your raison d'etre?
I think Keats was saying this. When we studied this poem in Alan Perlis's great Brit Lit class at UAB, someone in the class interpreted the poem in a completely different way that was consistent to where we are as a culture, but not in a way that I thought was consistent at all with Keats's own words.
Interesting thought: "what if our self, the big You as I framed it earlier... our great dreams and visions of greatness and our hoped-for attainment of equilibrium and emergence from the web of therapy and into that great new time we imagine...
...what if that doesn't really matter? What if all of it sinks to nothingness in the final analysis?"
There is a Buddhist strain to this thinking that I've never been able to follow. Desire might be the root of all misery, but it's also the root of all art (IMO). I also think that our particular selves live on long after we pass -- in the memories of others, the ways our survivors either emulate or avoid emulating us. I'm mindful that if I disappeared suddenly, that void would have an enormous impact on my kids. Who I am contains portions of how my great grandfather parented my grandmother, and so on.
I quite take your point about escaping the extreme misery that comes from self-absorption by redirecting that attention outward. I just don't buy the other extreme, which a different therapist nudged me toward. Take the "I" out of it, she would say. But none of us can really do that.
So I try to balance things. My kids are my first priority. But I still have goals as a writer, passions, dreams. I have to have those things to avoid becoming a cipher. Those passions, goals, and dreams are part of what I might pass along to others. In fact, in the best sense feeding those fires is one way of serving others. Fair enough?
In my own life experience, very unexpectedly, I've found that pretty much everything I ever wanted and got, I had to give up on and let go of first. Relationships, ambitions, jobs, success in research, a whole lot of it.
I don't mean this in some kind of mystical way. I mean it in a heartbreaking, very concrete and literal way, full of tears and anger and bitterness, and then... oh, hello, well I'll be damned!
I don't even know what it means, or why, and I don't know that it is generalizable to others. Unlike the pop psych or philosophy writers, I'm not being cutesy or allegorical. This is just the way my particular life has transpired. My dreams have died into life.
Now that I'm almost 60 and my parents and most of my mentors have passed on, my thoughts are also propelled by end-of-life considerations. By which I do *not* mean mainstream American culture's great fear and denial of death. Just the plain fact that many of the people who have meant the most to me, are no longer themselves around me at least in the way our society would generally acknowledge.
And, for those of us who have cared for people nearing the end of life, there is the hackneyed-but-true experience of realizing what did and did not matter in the end, or real close to it. It is again trite-but-true that in most cases, those with great accomplishments find them unsatisfying in the end. In my area of science, I was and am powerfully moved by the Nobelist S. Chandrasekhar's open admission to his protege-biographer that all of his amazing, multidisciplinary discoveries (including the black hole) didn't seem like much, in the end. (My copy of his bio is at the office or I'd quote it.) If he couldn't find salvation in science, I was *never* gonna find it--that was my takeaway when I was 27 or so. "There must be other things," he said, and that was a big eye-opener to me in terms of what I was going to do with my own life.
Well said: "My dreams have died into life." I'm still in the midst of that transformation now, hoping the last part of the sentence will come true. One mercy has been releasing a great many things that only had importance in my academic life and that truly don't matter now (maybe never did). I'm also mindful that capital "s" Success in any of my professional ventures would require me to make that my foremost priority. My kids are my first priority, so I'm trying to embrace a professional life that is still ambitious on a certain scale, that has goals, but that is not all consuming. It's delicate, but I think it's a balance that I'll honor later. Thanks for engaging and sharing so deeply.
First of all, your teenage baseball decision is symbolic of Mets fandom.
On a more serious note, I grew happier for you as i read the essay because I was reading about a transformation toward greater clarity as well as an unshackling from the specter of "The Guard."
Your conclusion is spot on. I read your essays because they are yours. And I find them both a pleasure to read and thought provoking
Ugh, yes. Maybe "The Mets" is the Occam's Razor explanation for my misguided thinking over the years!
It's a pleasure to read your work, too, David. And you are one of those readers I would never have encountered if I'd remained in my lit mag bubble. It's richer and more stimulating out here.
Thank you for your reflections in this essay. It moved me, and so, despite not knowing anything about you, I am pulled to write something in reply.
Trust seems to be one of the unknowables, yet I have found a way to master it within myself. I believe that everyone can.
It doesn’t mean that I am always “right”. I have come to know that “being right” is not what constitutes trust. Trust comes from knowing when to ask more questions, knowing when to pause, knowing when you have reached the limit with the people you are with (be they lovers, friends or therapists).
I’ve been a therapist for 30+ years. And as my MD father used to say, that he and I were the only professionals he knew that continually tried to work ourselves out of a job. Yes. That is the way that I work.
My job is to shine a light on your inner knowing, to dust away preconceived and stereotypical thoughts pressed on you by society. And to help you learn to trust yourself most of all.
Trust doesn’t come from alienation nor rigid thoughts. Real trust knows when to slow down and when to run. What are the ways of viewing your past (the old baseball decision or the marriage or whatever) that allow your heart and head to be most at ease? To rest in peace? Search for that. Be curious about that, and you will have found where to begin learning trust.
Thanks for contributing! I love this: "Trust comes from knowing when to ask more questions, knowing when to pause, knowing when you have reached the limit with the people you are with (be they lovers, friends or therapists)." As a writer, I must say that trust also comes from call and response. This is also true in relationships. Knowing who it is I'm trying to reach and listening carefully to the reply is a big part of my writing practice. So knowing that my story moved you, a stranger with intimate knowledge of the subject, is very meaningful. Thank you.
Have you ever tested on MB? They are of course based on Carl Jung’s theories.
Great essay.
As you know I try to live a spiritual life—seeking to help others as one of my primary drivers—which takes me out of self. Selfish and self-centered thinking is where most of our problems germinate. I’ve explored it all and have found this to be most reliable. I continue to “do the work”—not as a panacea—but as a byproduct of my curiosity. You too have that curiosity. Our paths may differ but our quest is aligned—to be a better man. Despite what Eddie Vedder sings—we’re out there! And you’re one of them. 🙏
Thank you for taking issue with that dreadful phrase, "do the work." It gives me the creeps.
This somehow fits well with Sydney Michalski's essay today that I just read. Your essay reminds me of the choices that we can't see clearly, and hers emphasizes just-being (in a humorous way). Then I come back to your essay and remember all the choices I have to make as a human, and that helps explain our human tendency to worry - more and more, sometimes, with age and experience, once we start racking up a little history. Give a species free will, and trust it to start fretting eventually when it discovers that not all choices feel great. It seems that a corollary of having free will is that we have to make peace with the fact that some of our choices will hurt. (One might, before therapy, have said that some of our choices would "be wrong.") Making peace with this is a tall order.
But your symphonic last paragraphs make it sound simple enough. Does the burden of free will get lighter if we understand every choice as a journey into love, or discovery of what love *is*? I don't know. I'll tell you at the pearly gates when I've got it figured out. (Surely - by then?)
"Does the burden of free will get lighter if we understand every choice as a journey into love, or discovery of what love *is*?"
I love that framing. So we're not trying to make perfect choices. We're taking risks for good reasons, opening ourselves to the world, letting love in. And sometimes that means getting hurt.
You won't find me at the pearly gates, so you'll have to tell me another way!
Excellent essay, and excellent questions to ask. Particularly this part: “I’m sure therapists follow ethical guidelines, but I wonder how many of them would agree that a person could graduate from talk therapy. Could energizing friendships, exercise, gardening — a whole and healthy life — be enough? Or is our culture so riddled with rot that we’re always going to be unbundling baggage about our bodies, identities, and past traumas? At what point does the language we learn in therapy have its own distorting effect? “
As a former European, now living in Montreal, I have noticed some stark differences between our cultures. While in Europe people are less likely to go to therapy, also because of the stigma attached, there is definitely more emphasis on the simple joys of life you have outlined here: meaningful friendships, walking everywhere, good food, less work and some much needed ‘dolce far niente’. In North America we are so focused on our “achievements” that we have little time for the things that actually matter. So now we have to pay for them! Therapy, gym membership etc. Of course this is a generalization, but I think there is an incredible value to community, friendships and gardening. And therapy has its place too. It can be helpful, no doubt. I also must confess that I know several therapists, who seem to be more lost for purpose than people without a therapist. So, there are definitely bad therapists out there who can do more harm than good! My trick to keep sane? Writing, yoga, friendships, walks, lots of laughter, cooking, good food, reading, travelling, and learning languages… Your observations on writing also rang very true to me!
Thank you, Imola. I've noticed that about Europeans during my brief travels abroad. Prague is a place filled with people enjoying parks, art, and other forms of leisure. There is assuredly a capitalist element there that has a hustle culture, but the city doesn't feel that way. Perhaps unsurprisingly, quiet and diversion feed creativity just as much as sustained attention. So we carry our ideas out into the garden and let them simmer a little longer.
I owe my readers a gardening essay! I'm making pesto this week (I usually make a year's supply), so maybe that would be story worthy.
I have so often felt that “do the work” is a code for “accept your position and how society oppresses—believe it’s for you to figure out, not the pressures of anything that you’re actually legitimately responding and reacting to.” oof. This was very validating to read on many levels.
Glad to hear that, Freya! It's interesting how services that are meant to be therapeutic can only compound what we carry when they miss the mark. Sending solidarity.
Welcome to the world of the formerly art-damaged. It’s bigger and you can get lost, but there’s plenty of open space. Funny that Cather crossed your mind. The Nebraska girl who got so much of her best material from the open space all around her, and rendered it in retrospect from NYC. As recently as a few days ago it was almost the only way forward. Now that the telegraph lines are secure you can park your camper just about anywhere, maybe even move around the landscape a bit.
This essay hits a grand slam out of the park. What is it about? Writing. Being human. Choices. Grief. Self. Love. Everything. What is this essay *not* about? Forcefully, convincingly written, as always.
"I’m sure therapists follow ethical guidelines, but I wonder how many of them would agree that a person could graduate from talk therapy. Could energizing friendships, exercise, gardening — a whole and healthy life — be enough? Or is our culture so riddled with rot that we’re always going to be unbundling baggage about our bodies, identities, and past traumas? At what point does the language we learn in therapy have its own distorting effect?"
Anything in life can have a distorting effect, including politics, therapy, Alcoholics Anonymous, even love, meditation, even kindness. Balance seems to be struggle of the twenty-first century. I think most of the time we can trust our instincts, our intuition.
There's a lot to unpack in all of these links. I suppose my point is the reverse of your final example. Are therapists attentive to windows when a patient might be ready to graduate from therapy, at least for a time? Or are they perpetually looking for more work to do? Because they'll find reason to keep a client coming back if they look for it. Not saying this is a breach of ethics and don't mean to malign therapists broadly, but I'm looking for a way of being that is more like the way we maintain our overall health -- best practices at the micro level, periodic checkups, largely defaulting to "okay" rather than "needs serious work."
Josh, I'm struck for far from the first time, given our disparate origins and upbringings, by our commonalities. That needn't be so, so it offers no absolutely comforting universal, but it pleases me in its possibility and, of course, more personally, makes me happy for us.
As I was approaching the end of the essay, the thought, in satisfaction, just naturally arose that this is a perfect essay. How it naturally evolved in its not necessary parts from its more general consideration to a more specific focus on loss of your marriage to your creative life. It's all right and true even in its uncertainties.
I first entered psychotherapy at 17 in response to specific problems in my life, a more general one being chronic depression. I left after a couple of years feeling neither dissatisfied with the experience (I'd gained some genuine self-knowledge and been listened to by someone trained to listen in a particular way) nor feeing I was *healed*. I wasn't. I'm still not. But I thought I could go and live on my own. I returned to therapy off and on over my life, always because of particular problems in my life I felt the need to talk through. I did a lot of that also with very close friends I trusted no more than my therapist to reveal *the truth* to me but who I thought could offer me valuable perspectives to consider. They did. My last therapist I saw off and on -- mostly off! -- for thirty years. I spent a couple of years with him last almost a decade ago when I, again, faced a particular problem in my life. Near the end, after his having recognized the direction It seemed very reasonably clear to himI wanted to go, and working then to help me get there, he reacted in vocal astonishment one day when he realized I was going to go the other way! We recently communicated in writing after his retirement, and I told him how things are in my life now. He was pleased and said he thought we'd done good work together over the years. I agreed. He didn't heal me. I wasn't healed. But talking with him, a trained and uniquely insightful person, helped me get through better than if I hadn't.
You end, so well:
"I have to trust my own curiosity. It’s the idea that teases my mind over days and weeks, the question that feels urgent to me, the ritual with a quirky history that guides my course.
"That’s not doing the work. That’s just love. Can trusting that love be enough?"
I'm going to say it's close to enough. It has to be. And that can still include, in the better instances, when the dice fall the right way, someone to love and trust and talk to.
Thank you, Jay -- for reading and for sharing so much of your own experience. I hope I have qualified my points enough to show that I'm not rejecting therapy wholesale. As you say, I've gained some useful insights into my past and some new vocabulary that has been occasionally helpful.
"Close to enough" sounds right.
Great musings! From a slightly different perspective, you're identifying how our culture of commodification and addiction--they go hand in hand--leaves you empty, sucked dry. The answer from our institutions is always "the work is never done; you need more, much more, of this; see you next time; swipe or insert here." Trusting yourself is never a legitimate answer, because then you wouldn't be spending the time/energy/money on whoever's selling you this product that you absolutely *have* to have in order to survive another day.
So, a good and healthy response to this is realizing that this is a scam. (Although a line has to be drawn between self-knowledge and knowledge of, say, the physical world. Because a blanket version is this is how we end up with people rejecting hundreds of years of research into, say, global warming or evolution and relying on themselves.) Focus on yourself and what you can intuit and comprehend without the use of middleman mediators. *You* are the expert of your own life, you're living it.
I propose that there's a still better answer.
When you rebel from the middleman scammers, then it's easily framed as You vs. The Scammers. And the energy you once invested in trusting the experts, becomes invested in the You. Very binary.
But what if life isn't all about the You, after all?
Being all wrapped up in the You is only some improvement beyond being all tied up by the 'experts' of your life. What if you could be not-all-wrapped-up in either one?
This isn't an altar call for a particular belief system. My favorite poet John Keats, not a subscriber to any religion, embodied it as well as anyone I've ever known, at least in his writings. Perhaps the Rationalist's Curse's antidote is the Empath's Embrace of the other?
One of my favorite lines in any film is from the French-Canadian socialist/atheist Denys Arcand's "Jésus de Montréal" from 1989. At the end of the thoroughly heretical Passion Play that is at the heart of the film, the character who seems to represent the Apostle John says to the baffled-but-intrigued small audience on the mountain in Montréal:
"Life is really very simple.
It just seems overwhelming
when you think only of yourself.
If you forget yourself
and ask how to help others,
life becomes perfectly simple."
John, you anticipate a question I've been carrying for a while but haven't found the right frame to write about, namely, how to find the proper balance between questioning scams (or other forms of upselling) without lapsing into the climate denial, anti-vaxxer camp. It's tough. I am aware that many professionals that I ought to trust, like dentists and the vet where I take my cats, are trained to offer unessential services as add-ons. I see this model in entrepreneurship circles, too. Sifting through the information and drawing independent conclusions is necessary, but it's discouraging that it's increasingly necessary within institutions that I once trusted with less skepticism.
To your final point, this is the upshot of Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." Caring for others is the way out of Ivan's misery. But that can also be a recipe for burnout. And Ilyich doesn't live very long after his revelation, so he doesn't have to sustain it over years. I do embrace the necessity of self-care, so perhaps I've adopted some of the language of therapy, after all.
How to be skeptical without being a flake: a tough task in subjects you aren't yourself an expert in. Even in my own discipline, I've had to iterate a bit over the years on, yes, global warming. Human institutions are flawed, even those that have some self-correcting aspects to them (e.g., science). In general what I do is read the evidence, listen to tone, watch out for logical fallacies and other tip-offs that the speaker is loading the dice, think about the reasonableness of the position, do some additional reading, and I also watch to see if the speaker ultimately seems to have a personal stake/vendetta etc. that biases their view. It's a version of close reading, I suppose?
Excellent point with the Tolstoy reference. I think of Keats's oft-misunderstood "When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be" in response. Our culture, which I think of as quite rooted in the Romantic perspective of self and self-consciousness etc., is focused on self-help, self-this, self-that. The self is what matters. But... what was Keats's own thought in the poem about ceasing to be, never getting to do all the things that he could do (write, love, etc.), perhaps with an anticipation of burnout over caring for sick relatives and overworking in crap jobs to support his relatives in Louisville, KY? What does he say at the end?:
"then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink."
In other words, and I think this is a very radical thought in our time: what if our self, the big You as I framed it earlier... our great dreams and visions of greatness and our hoped-for attainment of equilibrium and emergence from the web of therapy and into that great new time we imagine...
...what if that doesn't really matter? What if all of it sinks to nothingness in the final analysis?
Paradoxically, is it possible that the *only* way to attain those things is by giving up on them, letting them go as your raison d'etre?
I think Keats was saying this. When we studied this poem in Alan Perlis's great Brit Lit class at UAB, someone in the class interpreted the poem in a completely different way that was consistent to where we are as a culture, but not in a way that I thought was consistent at all with Keats's own words.
Interesting thought: "what if our self, the big You as I framed it earlier... our great dreams and visions of greatness and our hoped-for attainment of equilibrium and emergence from the web of therapy and into that great new time we imagine...
...what if that doesn't really matter? What if all of it sinks to nothingness in the final analysis?"
There is a Buddhist strain to this thinking that I've never been able to follow. Desire might be the root of all misery, but it's also the root of all art (IMO). I also think that our particular selves live on long after we pass -- in the memories of others, the ways our survivors either emulate or avoid emulating us. I'm mindful that if I disappeared suddenly, that void would have an enormous impact on my kids. Who I am contains portions of how my great grandfather parented my grandmother, and so on.
I quite take your point about escaping the extreme misery that comes from self-absorption by redirecting that attention outward. I just don't buy the other extreme, which a different therapist nudged me toward. Take the "I" out of it, she would say. But none of us can really do that.
So I try to balance things. My kids are my first priority. But I still have goals as a writer, passions, dreams. I have to have those things to avoid becoming a cipher. Those passions, goals, and dreams are part of what I might pass along to others. In fact, in the best sense feeding those fires is one way of serving others. Fair enough?
Definitely.
In my own life experience, very unexpectedly, I've found that pretty much everything I ever wanted and got, I had to give up on and let go of first. Relationships, ambitions, jobs, success in research, a whole lot of it.
I don't mean this in some kind of mystical way. I mean it in a heartbreaking, very concrete and literal way, full of tears and anger and bitterness, and then... oh, hello, well I'll be damned!
I don't even know what it means, or why, and I don't know that it is generalizable to others. Unlike the pop psych or philosophy writers, I'm not being cutesy or allegorical. This is just the way my particular life has transpired. My dreams have died into life.
Now that I'm almost 60 and my parents and most of my mentors have passed on, my thoughts are also propelled by end-of-life considerations. By which I do *not* mean mainstream American culture's great fear and denial of death. Just the plain fact that many of the people who have meant the most to me, are no longer themselves around me at least in the way our society would generally acknowledge.
And, for those of us who have cared for people nearing the end of life, there is the hackneyed-but-true experience of realizing what did and did not matter in the end, or real close to it. It is again trite-but-true that in most cases, those with great accomplishments find them unsatisfying in the end. In my area of science, I was and am powerfully moved by the Nobelist S. Chandrasekhar's open admission to his protege-biographer that all of his amazing, multidisciplinary discoveries (including the black hole) didn't seem like much, in the end. (My copy of his bio is at the office or I'd quote it.) If he couldn't find salvation in science, I was *never* gonna find it--that was my takeaway when I was 27 or so. "There must be other things," he said, and that was a big eye-opener to me in terms of what I was going to do with my own life.
Well said: "My dreams have died into life." I'm still in the midst of that transformation now, hoping the last part of the sentence will come true. One mercy has been releasing a great many things that only had importance in my academic life and that truly don't matter now (maybe never did). I'm also mindful that capital "s" Success in any of my professional ventures would require me to make that my foremost priority. My kids are my first priority, so I'm trying to embrace a professional life that is still ambitious on a certain scale, that has goals, but that is not all consuming. It's delicate, but I think it's a balance that I'll honor later. Thanks for engaging and sharing so deeply.
First of all, your teenage baseball decision is symbolic of Mets fandom.
On a more serious note, I grew happier for you as i read the essay because I was reading about a transformation toward greater clarity as well as an unshackling from the specter of "The Guard."
Your conclusion is spot on. I read your essays because they are yours. And I find them both a pleasure to read and thought provoking
Ugh, yes. Maybe "The Mets" is the Occam's Razor explanation for my misguided thinking over the years!
It's a pleasure to read your work, too, David. And you are one of those readers I would never have encountered if I'd remained in my lit mag bubble. It's richer and more stimulating out here.
Thank you for your reflections in this essay. It moved me, and so, despite not knowing anything about you, I am pulled to write something in reply.
Trust seems to be one of the unknowables, yet I have found a way to master it within myself. I believe that everyone can.
It doesn’t mean that I am always “right”. I have come to know that “being right” is not what constitutes trust. Trust comes from knowing when to ask more questions, knowing when to pause, knowing when you have reached the limit with the people you are with (be they lovers, friends or therapists).
I’ve been a therapist for 30+ years. And as my MD father used to say, that he and I were the only professionals he knew that continually tried to work ourselves out of a job. Yes. That is the way that I work.
My job is to shine a light on your inner knowing, to dust away preconceived and stereotypical thoughts pressed on you by society. And to help you learn to trust yourself most of all.
Trust doesn’t come from alienation nor rigid thoughts. Real trust knows when to slow down and when to run. What are the ways of viewing your past (the old baseball decision or the marriage or whatever) that allow your heart and head to be most at ease? To rest in peace? Search for that. Be curious about that, and you will have found where to begin learning trust.
I wish you all the best.
Thanks for contributing! I love this: "Trust comes from knowing when to ask more questions, knowing when to pause, knowing when you have reached the limit with the people you are with (be they lovers, friends or therapists)." As a writer, I must say that trust also comes from call and response. This is also true in relationships. Knowing who it is I'm trying to reach and listening carefully to the reply is a big part of my writing practice. So knowing that my story moved you, a stranger with intimate knowledge of the subject, is very meaningful. Thank you.
Love this, “call and response”.
Josh my favorite line is the first one. Truly you might be an ISF in the Meyers Briggs test of personalities.
https://www.verywellmind.com/isfj-introverted-sensing-feeling-judging-2795990
Have you ever tested on MB? They are of course based on Carl Jung’s theories.
Great essay.
As you know I try to live a spiritual life—seeking to help others as one of my primary drivers—which takes me out of self. Selfish and self-centered thinking is where most of our problems germinate. I’ve explored it all and have found this to be most reliable. I continue to “do the work”—not as a panacea—but as a byproduct of my curiosity. You too have that curiosity. Our paths may differ but our quest is aligned—to be a better man. Despite what Eddie Vedder sings—we’re out there! And you’re one of them. 🙏
Definitely leaning into curiosity. Thanks, brother.
Curiosity is a powerful way to move towards trust.
Thank you for taking issue with that dreadful phrase, "do the work." It gives me the creeps.
This somehow fits well with Sydney Michalski's essay today that I just read. Your essay reminds me of the choices that we can't see clearly, and hers emphasizes just-being (in a humorous way). Then I come back to your essay and remember all the choices I have to make as a human, and that helps explain our human tendency to worry - more and more, sometimes, with age and experience, once we start racking up a little history. Give a species free will, and trust it to start fretting eventually when it discovers that not all choices feel great. It seems that a corollary of having free will is that we have to make peace with the fact that some of our choices will hurt. (One might, before therapy, have said that some of our choices would "be wrong.") Making peace with this is a tall order.
But your symphonic last paragraphs make it sound simple enough. Does the burden of free will get lighter if we understand every choice as a journey into love, or discovery of what love *is*? I don't know. I'll tell you at the pearly gates when I've got it figured out. (Surely - by then?)
Terrific essay.
"Does the burden of free will get lighter if we understand every choice as a journey into love, or discovery of what love *is*?"
I love that framing. So we're not trying to make perfect choices. We're taking risks for good reasons, opening ourselves to the world, letting love in. And sometimes that means getting hurt.
You won't find me at the pearly gates, so you'll have to tell me another way!
Haha! Okay, moss-hung live oak gates at the foot of a basalt cliff, then.
That works.
😅
Wow. So much going on here.
Excellent essay, and excellent questions to ask. Particularly this part: “I’m sure therapists follow ethical guidelines, but I wonder how many of them would agree that a person could graduate from talk therapy. Could energizing friendships, exercise, gardening — a whole and healthy life — be enough? Or is our culture so riddled with rot that we’re always going to be unbundling baggage about our bodies, identities, and past traumas? At what point does the language we learn in therapy have its own distorting effect? “
As a former European, now living in Montreal, I have noticed some stark differences between our cultures. While in Europe people are less likely to go to therapy, also because of the stigma attached, there is definitely more emphasis on the simple joys of life you have outlined here: meaningful friendships, walking everywhere, good food, less work and some much needed ‘dolce far niente’. In North America we are so focused on our “achievements” that we have little time for the things that actually matter. So now we have to pay for them! Therapy, gym membership etc. Of course this is a generalization, but I think there is an incredible value to community, friendships and gardening. And therapy has its place too. It can be helpful, no doubt. I also must confess that I know several therapists, who seem to be more lost for purpose than people without a therapist. So, there are definitely bad therapists out there who can do more harm than good! My trick to keep sane? Writing, yoga, friendships, walks, lots of laughter, cooking, good food, reading, travelling, and learning languages… Your observations on writing also rang very true to me!
Thank you, Imola. I've noticed that about Europeans during my brief travels abroad. Prague is a place filled with people enjoying parks, art, and other forms of leisure. There is assuredly a capitalist element there that has a hustle culture, but the city doesn't feel that way. Perhaps unsurprisingly, quiet and diversion feed creativity just as much as sustained attention. So we carry our ideas out into the garden and let them simmer a little longer.
I owe my readers a gardening essay! I'm making pesto this week (I usually make a year's supply), so maybe that would be story worthy.
Joshua, I’m usually not a fan of instagram short, but a friend sent this to me and it gives a chilling summary of what I was partly saying…
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6KI3V-Sfsp/?igsh=bzQ2cDF5NWEzZnJw
I have so often felt that “do the work” is a code for “accept your position and how society oppresses—believe it’s for you to figure out, not the pressures of anything that you’re actually legitimately responding and reacting to.” oof. This was very validating to read on many levels.
Glad to hear that, Freya! It's interesting how services that are meant to be therapeutic can only compound what we carry when they miss the mark. Sending solidarity.
Welcome to the world of the formerly art-damaged. It’s bigger and you can get lost, but there’s plenty of open space. Funny that Cather crossed your mind. The Nebraska girl who got so much of her best material from the open space all around her, and rendered it in retrospect from NYC. As recently as a few days ago it was almost the only way forward. Now that the telegraph lines are secure you can park your camper just about anywhere, maybe even move around the landscape a bit.
This essay hits a grand slam out of the park. What is it about? Writing. Being human. Choices. Grief. Self. Love. Everything. What is this essay *not* about? Forcefully, convincingly written, as always.
Thanks so much, Tara!
https://music.apple.com/us/album/100-acres-of-sycamore/1727792595?i=1727792596
Excellent: the best point you make, I think:
"I’m sure therapists follow ethical guidelines, but I wonder how many of them would agree that a person could graduate from talk therapy. Could energizing friendships, exercise, gardening — a whole and healthy life — be enough? Or is our culture so riddled with rot that we’re always going to be unbundling baggage about our bodies, identities, and past traumas? At what point does the language we learn in therapy have its own distorting effect?"
Anything in life can have a distorting effect, including politics, therapy, Alcoholics Anonymous, even love, meditation, even kindness. Balance seems to be struggle of the twenty-first century. I think most of the time we can trust our instincts, our intuition.
Well done.
There's a lot to unpack in all of these links. I suppose my point is the reverse of your final example. Are therapists attentive to windows when a patient might be ready to graduate from therapy, at least for a time? Or are they perpetually looking for more work to do? Because they'll find reason to keep a client coming back if they look for it. Not saying this is a breach of ethics and don't mean to malign therapists broadly, but I'm looking for a way of being that is more like the way we maintain our overall health -- best practices at the micro level, periodic checkups, largely defaulting to "okay" rather than "needs serious work."