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I share this with Wendell as the minutes wind down in our final session. “Let’s consider this a pause in the conversation,” I say. “Like every week, but longer.” I tell him I may come back one day, because it’s true; people leave and come back at different times in their lives. And when they do, the therapist is still there, sitting in the same chair, holding all of their shared history. “We can still consider it a pause,” Wendell replies, then adds the part that’s hardest to say. “Even if we don’t meet again.” I smile, knowing exactly what he means. Relationships in life don’t really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you’ve been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)—all of them evoke memories, conscious or not. Often they inform how you relate to yourself and others. Sometimes you have conversations with them in your head; sometimes they speak to you in your sleep.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
Lori Gottlieb
Her curiosity piqued, Gallagher set out to better understand the role that attention—that is, what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life. After five years of science reporting, she came away convinced that she was witness to a “grand unified theory” of the mind: Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.
• The lack of purpose and direction • The sense of isolation or abandonment, being disconnected • The feeling of insignificance (e.g., “Do I matter?”) In other words, does anyone but me care whether I belong to this organization, institution, or family? Does anybody but me care whether or not I show up to work? This lack of affirmation in interpersonal relationships and from organizations is scary. At a time when, to quote William Butler Yeats, “the centre cannot hold,” being adrift is terrifying.1 In the face of bewildering change and even chaos, people want to feel they matter. While purpose has a few different dimensions—spiritual, familial, professional—it’s the one that we’re concerned about here. We need to understand who we are and in what context we are supposed to do work. More important, we want to know what our work is. What we find ourselves looking for is what Vicktor Frankl wrote about in Man’s Search For Meaning shortly after World War II—that people are driven to figure out what they were put on this planet to do and to be.
Flying Without a Net
Thomas J. DeLong
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