30 1/2

With the readjustment of my schedule, plus the introduction of two beautiful granddaughters into my world, there has been a big shift in my life.  I have three and a half work days followed by three and a half days with little or no work. 

The two worlds are radically different. Often, on a day that I am not working, even the idea of having to make a phone call seems like such an intrusion.  I have to gear up, rearrange my mind and actively remember how to do it.  On the days that I do work I am up two hours earlier.  I stretch faithfully, I join the flow of heavy traffic and I am deeply immersed in the world.

Wednesday of this week was one of those work days that were the original inspiration for me to begin this blog.  It seemed as if the whole world, in its many variations was parading into my office. I had ten consecutive hours of appointments, each unique and totally different that the previous.  It was well after 7 PM, when I cleaned off my desk, and realized that my impression of the day was totally Fellini-esque.  8 1/2 all over.

Most of you are too young to have experienced 8 1/2 at it's original time.  The movie is perfect and marvelously done, yet has not real plot, makes little sense,  and it may or may not mean what you think.  The images are still so memorable and grab that sense of how life is, at those times when life overwhelming and incomprehensible. From the first scene of being trapped in a traffic jam and having a panic attack alone in car, to the end, the parade of the characters, it was an exact description of the feeling of last Wednesday.

The clowns, the acrobats, the jugglers, the beautiful women, the painted women, the fretting businessmen, the sad wives, the lost unfaithful husbands, and the director who is searching, searching for an underlying theme.

That is what I do after  a day like that.  I still do it after thirty years of doing therapy.
Who are these people?  How did they get like this?  What can I do for them?
and then, a the meta-level--

Why is the world like this?  Why do people do these things to each other?  If, as many of my patients say, "everything happens for a reason"  why is it that I don't see the reason---
except to continue on, searching for the reason. Or ,as the Guido character in the movie says: "I have nothing to say, but I want to say it."

I stopped on the way home that night and bought a pizza.  The next morning I was back in the office.  A woman came in and told me how she was proud that she has been making progress.  She has recycled six (out of 12 -- probably really 30) clean, empty plastic orange juice bottles that could have had be re-used many times for many purposes.

She did it, but then she cried.

Change is difficult.

Reality is hard to define.