The School of Life

Our encounter with nature calms us because none of our troubles, disappointments or hopes has any relevance to it.

Training the body in an athletic pursuit can give us a glorious sense of physical mastery and momentary perfection.

There are some of us who regularly feel a powerful need to go away and think rather more than is typically allowed or taken to be normal. This business of thinking can seem to us like one of the most meaningful things we ever do. After too long in company, we crave to be alone with our own minds. Raw experience proves too overwhelming, dense, messy, confused or exciting, and, on a regular basis, we long to sort through it, far away from distractions.

Once viewed as a kind of long dream that meant nothing and could be forgotten about as soon as it was over, childhood is now conceived of as a momentously consequential period in which the entire emotional disposition of a person will be formed and their chances of a mentally healthy life determined.

We start out knowing only about ‘being loved’. It comes to seem – very wrongly – like the norm.

The relationship is almost entirely non-reciprocal. The parent loves, but they do not expect the favour to be returned in any significant way.

In a secret part of our minds, we picture someone who will understand our needs, bring us what we want, be immensely patient and sympathetic with us, act selflessly and make it all better.

This is – naturally – a disaster.

and into the parental position.

Parents become very good at not hearing the explicit words and listening instead to what the child means but doesn’t yet know how to say: ‘I’m lonely, in pain, or frightened’ – distress that then unfairly comes out as an attack on the safest, kindest, most reliable thing in the child’s world: the parent.

‘Whenever I have the strength in me to do so, I will imitate those who once loved me and take care of my partner as these figures cared for me. The task isn’t an unfair chore or a departure from the true nature of love. It is the only kind of love really worthy of that exalted word.’