“Since I’ve learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me.”
– Rilke
On the corner of Powell and Market, a gold figure is standing on a box coverd in gold paint, stock still. Families passing by the gold figure wear sweatshirts with “San Francisco” stitched in a white arc from armpit to armpit. They bought these at a gift shop when, surprised by August on the big rust-red bridge, they had to bend double against the wind and fog streaming past them. The gold figure was waiting for someone (a curious child) to venture a little closer–WHOOOSHH! He releases a puff of steam or smoke from a pipe somewhere under his gold carapace and tilts his body forward toward the child in a uniform, machine arc. The child jumps back, the parents laugh and everyone takes a step closer to his hat, which was also gold and half filled with green.
Everyone except for me. I cut through the gathering crowd with precise movements, irritated at every deviation from the straight line I’m trying to walk from the BART station to the revolving door of the stone building on the other side of the crowd. I have two minutes before therapy begins.
Through the marble lobby, up the elevator to the ninth floor, I see the sign for Gal Szekely, The Couples Center. I sit down on the couch, one minute late. My therapist has dark eyes and an exceedingly steady gaze, mid-forties, raspy voice and a strong grip. “Would you like to pour yourself some water?” he asks from his chair–something from Knoll, I note with interest. He is supposed to be the best.
He is the first therapist I’ve ever seen. When I met him I felt his unblinking curiosity; I had never met anyone so quiet, yet so involved in the conversation. I said to myself, “Aha, this is someone who can actually get shit done, not some Berkeley hippie-turned-psychologist who will endlessly rake over my childhood, ‘And how did that make you feel?’”
“Welcome, Joshua. How are you today?” His emphasis is slightly toward the “today” rather than “are” or “you.”
I begin to unfurl a list, an agenda composed on the BART. I am paying him $300 for this hour. Let’s do this:
- “This is where the due diligence on my company acquisition is: getting closer, but signficant questions remain. I need to bring value and confidence.”
- “This is where my marriage is: stuck, unsure. What do I need to be doing better?”
- “This is where my family is: there’s a lot to fix. I’ve tried upfront contracts, needs assessment–but nothing seems to take. Same old story since I was a teenager, trying to figure out their shit. What am I doing wrong?”
I am a growth mindset animal, hungry to eat problems for lunch.
As I speak, Gal folds his hands and looks at me steadily. There are a few small nods, but I am not sure he’s getting what I’m saying. I’m laying these problems out and the clock is ticking, we need–
“Have you noticed your right hand?” he says.
“What?”
“Your right hand–I notice you’re squeezing it. Pretty hard?”
“Oh, yeah I guess so.”
“What is that you are squeezing?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you had to name something that your hand is squeezing right now, what do you think it might be?”
I am quiet. I can feel my nails digging into my palm, thumb outstretched.
A long beat. “I am squeezing,” I say like I am speaking to a child, “because I am frustrated that I am putting in the work and not seeing the results.”
I smirk at this little dig; now he’s in the hot seat.
Unperturbed: “As an experiment, what if you relaxed your hand five percent?”
I take in this bizarre diversion. “What would that accomplish? If you want me to relax my hand, if that’s the solution, then why don’t I relax it one hundred percent?”
“Good, relax it one hundred percent,” he says. “Okay, continue.”
I continue on: the business, the marriage, the family. One minute passes.
“I noticed your right hand is very tight again,” he says.
I look down. My fist has re-formed.
“Do you want to try five percent this time?” he asks.
Somewhat alarmed that my hand is doing this thing without my say so, I concede: “Okay, five percent.”
I relax it a tiny bit. But I can’t say if it’s five percent, or seven, or three, or even ten–this is some subjective bullshit. What’s my benchmark here?
Gal looks at me and we are silent for a while, my fist sitting on my lap.
Then, “What does it feel like now?”
I am quiet because there is some black magic here. I am trying to hold just five percent in my carefully calibrated hand. But my body, which had been an undifferentiated solid mass, now feels like islands in a river, like stations on a train track. The river, the train, is moving slowly, but beneath my skin, between muscle, organ and bone there is a conversation without words. For the first time in a long time, though my body is still, I am aware of movement inside my body.
I had felt this before, backpacking the High Sierra. I had left my camp and the trail with a few snacks and a water bottle for a dayhike to climb a small peak. After I reached the top, I consulted the map, and saw that the trail wound around the other side of the mountain–a shorter way back to camp. After descending that way for a few hours, I encountered cliff bands at least fifty feet high with only a few narrow, scrambly ramps between them. The evening was fading, and I debated what to do. Sitting on a rock, I felt the tension in me: I was off-trail, high up, without my camping gear or a flashlight. I could try to sleep up here, or I could go down this way, now. In the quiet chill wind, marmots chirped from under surrounding boulders. I knew myself to be a small animal on a rock in the wild, too.
Costs, benefits and probabilities receded until my body stood up and began to pick its way down the precipice, stone by stone, in the fading dusk.
new gods 