A Therapeutic Journey

We don’t need to make art in order to learn the most valuable lesson of artists, which is about noticing properly, living with our eyes open and thereby, along the way, savoring time. Without any intention to create something that could be put in a gallery, we could—as part of a goal of living more deliberately–take a walk in an unfamiliar part of

We are the insane ones and they will always fly the flags of health, rationality, and balance. They feel sorry for us from afar: We are the proverbial drowning man and they the observer on dry land.

Loving companions bear no such hints of superiority. They do not judge us as beneath them when we lie crumpled in our pyjamas at midday because they do

Except that there was a French photographer right opposite who was very much into noticing everything: an elegant, willowy man, with a name impossible for Americans to pronounce—he invited them to call him Harry—and a Leica 35 around his neck. Henri Cartier-Bresson had wandered the area all morning; he’d shot a group of women chatting outside on Gr

The essence of psychotherapy lies in a willingness to get systematically interested in why we constantly respond in the bizarre and uncalled-for ways we exhibit. It asks by what sequence of formative experiences an otherwise perfectly decent and intelligent person could be led to sob on the floor or threaten to jump out of the window after an argum

The news constantly provides us with a ringside seat at the most compelling and horrendous issues of our times, which feed both our outrage and our sense that there must be something we can do to try to prevent disaster. But in the process, we forget the radical limits on our powers to intervene effectively in pretty much any of the dilemmas that b

Anger creeps into love and destroys admiration. We cease to delight because we unknowingly grow entangled in various forms of unprocessed annoyance. We can’t cheer them on because, somewhere deep inside, we are inhibited by trace memories of certain let-downs, large and small, of which they have been guilty without their knowing.

We would at such points be advised to lean on a technique pioneered and much favored by psychotherapy known as “reflective listening.” The theory behind it is that an important share of our most serious problems have no solutions in any practical sense. There are simply no “answers” to losing lots of money, being excluded from a social circle, or f

We can blame ourselves too much for our mental suffering. It is not that we are personally fragile but merely that we are living in a high-tech age that routinely smashes its more sensitive members to pieces through adherence to what will one day be recognized as a grossly primitive and unimaginative ethos.

Whereas past ages resigned themselves to offering modest destinies to most of their citizens, modernity has insisted that everyone—whatever their background or families of origin—should be capable of realizing the most stellar feats. No longer should anything—education, background, race, creed—stand in the way of ambition.

This has been in its way a