What do you believe about why we’re here, on earth, alive and mortal, right here and now? It’s a big question and sometimes it feels easier to focus on the small, daily tasks of living, the personal ups & downs and a narrower lens that doesn’t tend to overwhelm. But the undeniable truth seems to be that this tighter frame forces out not just the scarier parts but also the most exhilarating. It’s like Alan Watts said, “We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.” Perhaps part of the purpose of our aliveness is to practice, little by little all the time, the art of becoming more willing to sit with the pain so that we can become more able to sit with the pleasure. Another thing Alan Watts said: “The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
I am a writer—it’s what I believe I was born to do and it’s the one thing I might not survive this life without the freedom to keep doing. Somewhere along the way, my love of language (how it can be so strikingly and subtly wielded to help us understand and expand our lives) led me into the realm of psychotherapy and social justice. For the last eight years I’ve been seeing individuals and couples in private practice. It’s difficult, beautiful, and fascinating work. I learn something new every single day. And I meet so many people who teach me all kinds of important lessons about how to behave and what to value. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to cross paths with a human whose essence and perspective align with and challenge my own in ways that allow us both to truly evolve. I’ve often said that this role of psychotherapist is a “privilege” or “an honor,” and it is certainly both of those things. But I think the best way to describe the role, the work, the process of it all is to call it an adventure, alternately dark, daunting and then lovely, lit up with hope. I learn so much from these fellow humans we call “clients,” and I know, at my best, they’re learning a thing or two from me. By way of all my brilliant teachers, and my own lived experience, I am able to inhabit this role that I’ve taken to thinking about as conduit.
People come to me for myriad reasons and respond to me—and the adventure—in myriad ways. Many patterns and themes begin to present themselves, and any therapist will tell you they see a lot of repetition in what their caseload brings to the table. When someone’s reaction to this mysterious, adventurous leap of faith we call “therapy” is outside the bounds of these perennial patterns you, hopefully, take note. Four years ago someone came to me for reasons that are sacred and will stay in the silence but what I can tell you is that the way they came to me was different than most (not all) of what I’d encountered before. This person had a palpable energetic lightness to him and was immediately more humble, and also more confident, in his point of view than many are in their very first session. Over the course of the subsequent several years, I had the privilege and honor to go on an ever-expanding adventure with this person. The work got deeper and his engagement with his own aliveness grew. Like a tree rooting downward into the belly of the earth even as it reaches outward branching up with a joyful buoyancy, I watched this person take stock and make changes, delight in his gifts, and push at his resistance wherever it popped up.
A few days ago, this person’s time on the planet came to an abrupt and terrible end. When I got the news, my first thought—after the visceral shock began to wane a little—was that he, this person no longer alive, was precisely the person I’d want to talk to in a moment of learning about his death. I smiled at this thought because I knew he’d find it funny.
You aren’t always conscious of the precise nature of the attachment that you’re building (or have built) with a client. This is why we’re encouraged to participate in professional consultation and other networking opportunities where we can reflect on the people we’re working with, how we’re doing, how they’re doing, and what impact we seem to be having on one another across time. Once in a while I find myself more aware of the thing as it’s happening, and there’s one specific element that I think provides the explanation: laughter. When I was studying the philosophy of yoga some years ago, one of my teachers made a pointed effort to draw our attention to the presence of humor in so many Buddhist, and other mindfulness, writings. We talked about the power of a childlike attitude and the way properly timed/intentioned humorousness can change everything, even save a life. I’m happy to report that I was lucky to be raised among silliness, sarcasm, and a tilt towards gratitude (qualities that my practices and relationships help me enhance and integrate more and more all the time); I’m very happy also to note that because of who I was when I entered into the role of psychotherapist, most of my clients are similarly appreciative of the funny, or open to it at least.
I was reflecting on this with a friend and fellow therapist about a year ago as we talked through how we were coping with helping all of our clients cope with the ongoing pandemic alongside all the other societal and environmental meltdowns. “There’s this one client,” I told her, “he’s one of those you almost feel doesn’t need therapy in that he seems to have been born with the equanimity thing we’re all working so hard to acquire, but of course he has his growth edges like the rest of us. It’s just that he’s got such a healthy sense of humor, and so his resiliency is crazy high.” She smiled, knowingly, and told me to simply be grateful for my time with this client because it’s the people like him who, despite any unseen pain or healing they have to address, provide us—their therapists, their friends, their family—with a much-needed infusion of their curious and comical sensibility, a vicarious fortifying just from spending time in the presence of this lighter kind of soul.
She was right. In a way—and please pardon any creeping hyperbole or dramatics—these people pave the path for us to be with heavier stuff of life, the harder patches and the irrefutable ugliness that’s endemic to our world. Our work then, to repay the universe for these folks who keep us sane, is to commit to a daily ritual of getting very quiet and very still so we can listen to our own wisdom and remember who these people are in our lives, in all types of relationship, and to sit in several minutes of silent appreciation, and love, for everything they are and all they allow us to be.
The writer Sarah Wilson calls these people, “life naturals,” in her wildly instructive and resonant book First We Make The Beast Beautiful. She talks about how essential every personality type is, the way anxiety can be a critical tool for survival and improvement, how tender a guide the more sensitive among us are if we pay attention to them and make room. And still, in the end, it’s clear that she (who is not a life natural) is just a tad envious of, if mostly grateful for, the people she’s known who do have this thick thread of groundedness running through their center.
Each of us, each individual way of being, is an indispensable part of the order of the cosmos, so it seems. All we’re really saying I think—Buddha, Sarah Wilson, me, so many of you—is just how fucking great it is that among all the worriers, and the cynics, and the planners there are these bright stars of seemingly limitless joyfulness. All we are saying is give that a chance.
In honor of these people in our lives—and maybe it’s YOU—who bring so much laughter and lightheartedness (without ignorance or avoidance), and specifically in honor of my recently departed fellow human/former client/kindred spirit who’s been born into the next realm, I invite you to invest in the mindful development of a quieter, kinder, sillier, saner future in any ways that might work for you, including by sharing resources of time and/or money here.
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Death scares us and often sends us hiding from it in all manner of ways. Understandable as our fears are, we should try to be lovingly firm with ourselves and each other as we walk into the unknown future. Our planet is sick, our society is broken, and in the hearts of so many billions of people there is, ultimately, the central desire for love—to feel it, to give it, to revel in its many incarnations. When someone you care about dies you’re faced with a fork. I’ve lost a few very dear and foundational people and these experiences showed me how to find my way through—not around—the mortality of us all. You’ll find your own way and, at our best, we’ll all support each other along this nonlinear road of finding faith.
My only suggestion is to think about this process as part of the adventure. Being alive is mostly made better by accepting, and making your own relationship to, the fact that we will leave this life, one way or another. Faith doesn’t mean you know anything for certain, it only means you want to fill your mind and heart with ideas that comfort you and therefore make you calmer, kinder, and more focused on what you do have than what you don’t.
Whomever and whatever helps you develop your own philosophy of faith are the most important people and teachings we will spend time with while we’re alive. Seek them, share them, protect them, and respect everyone’s version of finding peace with this one precious life.
This little bit from the inside of my mind/soul is dedicated to Sam, who showed me the thing I suspected all along: the funny ones are deeper than you think and wiser than the rest.
Love to you all,
Emily