The Art of Becoming Unstuck

Stay Home, Missteps and other mistakes

by | Oct 25, 2020 | Tom's Former Blog

| Lady Standing at a Virginal, Vermeer, 1670-72 |

Considering separations can be a helpful way of thinking about many forms of alienation: experiences that leave us frightened, angry or ashamed. We might separate or be separated from who or what we feel offers us safety; we might feel separated from justice; we may feel unacceptable and unlovable.

The UK government’s simple message of ‘Stay Home’ is direct and clear … until the language around it changes, confusions and contradictions arise, and when we read or listen to the central message of ‘Stay Home’ we struggle to think of any real person saying it. Maybe in America, but not in Britain. ‘Stay home’ is a catchy phrase without a real author, or speaker. It is not ‘stay at home’.

A phrase associated with safety needs to be associated with a person – even a fictional character like the Green Cross man who used to lead public road-safety campaigns. When the author disappears, so does accountability and a sense of care. ‘Stay home’ sounds like a careless mistake, a word left out.

A mistake, not a misstep, which is another word slipping more frequently into everyday use, separated from any sense of … why? A mistake involves a far more severe judgement over something that has happened than a ‘misstep’.

These separations count.

A Way of Thinking

by | Oct 22, 2020 | Tom's Former Blog

| La Grande Jatte, Seurat, 1884: A Thought of the Future |

If you find a way of thinking about something it can be rather like finding the right sized envelope for a letter. Your thoughts become a message to someone or something who might understand you. Before that your thoughts might have an alarming tendency to race around in your head causing chaos, anxiety.

Finding that way of thinking means finding that addressee. I suppose when I think about things I might be writing to Bion, Bowen, Freud, Kafka, Reeves, or Van Gogh. Or I might say Athens, Bauhaus, Library, Paris. Places, institutions, these count just as much, if they can be found. If there’s a thought that I might, in my thoughts, be understood then there’s someone to read my letter.

Once there’s a way of thinking about something it feels as if life can go on. Traumatic memories are ones frozen out of thought. The future becomes unthinkable, and perhaps a fantasy or a vast frightening space, when the past is unreadable.

Life goes on.