Love and Work

Reading from Tuesday, February 14, 2012 yoga class

When a computer breaks, it doesn't fix itself.  You have to open it up and do something to it, or bring it to a specialist for repair.  The computer metaphor has so pervaded our thought that we sometimes think about people as computers, and about psychotherapy as the repair shop or a kind of reprogramming.  But people are not computers, and they usually recover on their own from almost anything that happens to them.  I think a better metaphor is that people are like plants.  During graduate school, I had a small garden in front of my house in Philadelphia.  I was not a very good gardener, and I traveled a lot in the summers, so sometimes my plants withered and nearly died.  But the amazing thing I learned about plants is that as long as they are not completely dead, they will spring back to full and glorious life if you just get the conditions right.  You can't fix a plant; you can only give it the right conditions--water, sun, and soil--and then wait.  It will do the rest.

If people are like plants what are the conditions we need to flourish?  First is LOVE!!  No man, woman, or child is an island.  We are ultrasocial creatures, and we can't be happy without having friends and secure attachments to other people.  Second is work (I define work broadly to include anyone's answer to the question, "So, what do you do?"  ("Student" and "full-time parent" are both good answers).  Love and work are, for people, obvious analogues to water and sunshine for plants.  When Freud was asked what a normal person should be able to do well, he is reputed to have said, "Love and work."  Leo Tolstoy wrote:  "One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one's work." 
                                           From the book "The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt


I must say, that I have been EXTREMELY blessed to have much love in my life... a husband and son who I cherish, friends who hold me up and remind me who I really am and work than sustains me... 20 years at the public library and now helping people get on Social Security disability.  Gosh... I have been given the conditions for a full life.