I’ve been on a counselling course. Everything you learn in life is a good thing, even the hard lessons. This wasn’t one of those tough ones though, it was a surprisingly rewarding and interesting experience, and I’m glad I participated.

Now I’m not going to review the course in this blog, much more interesting is to examine its impact on me and my thinking, maybe we’ll touch upon some of the details along the way because there were so many of them. We begin at the end, examining endings, this was for me the most thought-provoking of 12 weekly sessions.

What seems like a lifetime ago now, I was a young recruit in the British Army, I won best recruit at the midway point of training and was thought to be the best shot in the platoon right up until the last days when I made some sort of fuck-up that angered my training staff. However, a guy called Stephen Roscoe won the most improved prize, and I thought at the time that that was just about the most important recognition anyone could ever get in any endeavour they pursued. To come such a long way, to improve greatly, to grow as a soldier and as a person, and to discover a you that you maybe didn’t suspect you could be. This prize should maybe always hold the greatest value.

We end better than we started when we learn, and that’s the point, in fact we stay on an upward trajectory if we continue to absorb new skills and knowledge and wisdom. It’s the point of the course I studied for all parties involved in the discipline if it goes as intended. The course is at its end and the ending subject is how to end the therapeutic relationship when the time comes. The tutors question is “how do you feel about endings?”. Now I’m pretty introspective and I’m relatively objective about myself, I think.

As we get older we should be accumulating the wisdom to know we will be okay, this doesn’t seem to happen though, we become more against change even though we hold the experience of having changed ourselves and having faced changes that were not of our own volition many times. We survived, sometimes we thrived, other times we nearly went under. Some people do go under, I’m not talking about that end nor do I wish to give it any value, the goal of life is just to live, to think otherwise is to get caught in a narrative that serves someone else’s agenda, people who benefit from you following a higher power don’t actually believe in that higher power, stop being so naive!

Two people close to me often consider their own mortality, getting bogged down in a possible future (an inevitable future of course, but one with an infinite number of combinations of the how and when), and I think this is a mistake. Live like you are going to be around forever and there is a point, but act with the urgency that you may be gone in any of the coming moments, that way you will both actually live a worthwhile life and do fulfilling things, and you will know that things do will need to be done. The pointlessness of life is not something that you should ever consider, you must be important to you right here right now, not in some posthumous legacy where any praise you receive is impossible to bring you joy. Joy now for now’s sake, but just enough and not too much to trouble tomorrow or rob the joy of the days ahead. Do you think that Mozart enjoys his fame now, or that words said in kindness towards Kofi Anan make any difference to his current perspective? I don’t. Legacy is for ego now, the idea that we are building something for posterity is a falsehood, though that should never stop you from planting a tree of course.

How do I feel about endings ? I have to say I struggle if I’m honest. I have struggled with the end of relationships, even bad ones, I have struggled to leave a job even if I know there is better ones out there. I am predominantly built to favour stability and to fear risk, that is my personality type. Knowing this I have in the past taken chances, leaps of faith, but the older I get the less likely I am to do so and that’s a pity. I know this is as a mistake, the better outcome is only gained through risk, but then so is the lesser one, but the outcome of trying to stay still is that if you succeed then every day looks like the one that came before it and so will the ones that follow. Nobody actually wants to live the same day over and again, we are back in the realm of growing as a person again. See the difficulty?

Paul S Wilson