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It all starts with just a few notes on my digital piano, half a dozen or so. Beneath them I lay in some jazz chords, add in a bit of rhythm. I listen for the feeling those notes convey. The fledgling little riff gets me curious. I play it over and over.          And then another handful of notes crop up. The new notes complement those first ones, share their harmony and rhythm. I go back and forth between the two riffs, listening as an outsider to their conversation together.
      The creative process has begun.
      This process is not instantaneous, nor particularly easy. Non sequiturs and blind alleys loom in the midst of the creative work. Variations on the initial riffs push in that don’t seem to work. I get frustrated and yet I’m compelled by its possibilities. I keep going back, working to build on it. Gradually other variations that do fit make their way in. They add texture, create nuance. The more I work the emerging song, the more it whispers something to me about me.
      Gradually a coherence develops, a structure emerges.
      What had started out as a few minutes of doodling becomes days. Those days become weeks as the emerging song stretches and settles me. After a month or so, I’m ready to take it out for a Saturday afternoon spin at the coffee shop.
      A year or more later in performing the song I’ll still search it for it’s beauty, probing it again for that initial depth of feeling it promised when it first emerged.

It always starts with a single sentence. That sentence sits starkly on the computer screen, the cursor blinking beside the period which completes it.
      There’s a premise beneath those first words, one that had been playing on my mind over the previous few days. That’s always where it starts: a premise and then a first sentence.
      Then that first sentence begets another. Those sentences become a paragraph which begets other paragraphs. Conversations take place, things happen, stuff gets noticed and described.
      The creative process has begun.
      I realize that the questions I was supposed to have sorted out before I even began are being answered on the screen in front of me. I notice who’s telling the story, whether it’s one of the characters or a narrator detached enough to watch. I become aware of the when of the happenings, whether it is now or in the past.     
      Part way through the sentences and senses of the piece take over, create an inevitability to the story line. It feels a bit like tumbling. No, like being on the carousel as it speeds up, having to hold on. No, like a kite on its windy string trying to defy gravity, to drive itself upward, forward. It wakes me up in the middle of the night because there is something going on with my characters. It’s there to take advantage of the first sips of caffeine when I’m fresh the next morning.
      At this point I’m writing as a reader, following the story to find out what will happen. I keep going forward, content in the headspace of not yet knowing.    
      And then I do. The ending begins to draw me. An idea is emerging of what will become of the characters, what will resolve the perplexities of plot.
      Days have passed. At times I’ve been blocked or tired and I just had left the story unfinished, coming back to it when I was fresh. And as much as I realize that its writing has drained me, I’d never thought of it as work. It's been all about being with, and noticing, and sensing, and feeling.    
      The work of it begins once it’s written. There are rounds of editing to polish and prune the story. There are word tangles to straighten out, punctuation choices to make so the story can have its own rhythm.
      Then comes the vulnerability of showing the story to beta-readers for feedback. The wondering whether it will make sense to somebody else. While it’s out there, I tap my metaphorical fingers anxiously, hoping the story will twig a feeling, bring a memory to mind, make a reader stop and reflect a moment or two.
      And, probably within a few months, after I’ve incorporated feedback from beta-readers, after I have let it rest and gone back to smooth it even more, then I might take the story out for a spin at the coffee shop. I’ll watch people’s eyes as they listen.

This is not the first dance I’ve had with creativity. As a psychotherapist, I spent forty-two years co-creating healing conversations with my clients. Being creative. Doing creativity together.
      It went like this.
      After the greeting and small talk, the therapeutic conversation would begin, perhaps with a simple statement, maybe a curious and caring sort of question. My client’s participation in that conversation would allow us to set the stage together for the emergence of healing, of resilience, of hope.
      Together we would create a conversation that was a fit for that client’s needs and meet the requirements of my profession as defined by ethics, knowledgable good judgment, and skill. There’d be an emotional valance underneath those conversations, much like the harmonic structures beneath a jazz riff. There’d be celebration what it means to be human for that client, much like what occurs in a worthy piece of fiction.
      It didn’t always go easily. There were blind alleys, and periods of doldrums, and depths of suffering to simply witness and companion through together. But it was the ultimate creativity: creativity in the quest for wellness within and interconnectedness between.

So what is the take away?
I’ve been involved in three highly creative ventures and I realize that I’ve never been able to engineer the process or predict the outcome. I could set the stage, I could watch, I could participate on a skilled level, but I couldn’t force the possibilities within. Whatever was going to come of the creativity simply emerged.
      It all makes one wonder, eh?

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As I watch folk listening to my music at the coffee shop I notice some of them getting that far away look on their faces. They seem connected to the music, but also they seem to have gone somewhere within themselves as they listen. And I wonder, where? It’s the same thing I wonder when people read my short stories. Just where within those reader’s minds do those stories take them?
     My expression of the arts, musical and literary, is all about emotional communication. I’ve added a categorizing adjective there, emotional. It is about me sharing my emotions, those things I feel inside. At the keyboard, I don’t play covers or perform written music. To do so would be communicating the emotions of other performers or composers. Often those songs already have words embedded in them. Someone else’s words. Someone else’s experience. Someone else’s emotional experience in this world.
    I want the communication between myself and my listeners/readers to be personal, just between them and me, not some threesome with an unknown, non-present, other.
​    For my listeners, those intent on listening rather than just relegating my music into the background, I sense they may be feeling within themselves some of the emotions I had in creating the melodies, harmonies and rhythms. And even more, perhaps they’re feeling some of what I’m feeling on the other side of the keyboard as I play, listener and musician in a shared present and presence together.
    But there’s another dimension. Those emotions can nudge our minds to journey to some other time and place where we felt the same way.
    Recently, one of my listeners to a song I call Rain said it reminded her of being out in the falling snow. She had taken my mood state from walking in the rain embedded in the music and allowed it to take her to when she had been walking in a snow storm. Our two separate minds walked across the same emotional bridge created by the sounds of the keyboard to different experiences of moving through nature.
    During my four decades as a psychologist I learned the name of that bridge. It is the Affect Bridge (affect is the term psychotherapists use for an emotional response or a mood state). The affect bridge is a useful tool for helping folk understand why they were experiencing more intense emotions in response to situations than what might be expected. This tool is particularly helpful for folk experiencing strong reactions to triggers as a result of having experienced trauma in their past.
    In psychotherapy it works this way: in identifying a current emotional state in response to a present circumstance we ask the question when else did you feel this same way? In doing so, the client and the psychologist walk across the bridge of that emotion connecting the present and past circumstances. The unresolved emotion of the past experience had flowed into the present circumstance causing the subjective experience of it to surge. If that surge is unpleasant or disorienting, understanding where it originates helps to manage it.
    Making conscious connection to what we are feeling while listening to music, reading fiction, or looking at graphic arts renders a richer, more meaningful and personal experience because it serves as an entry point to that bridge.
    The amazing thing about this is that when it happens you suddenly don’t feel so alone. That artist (musical, graphic arts or literary) has told you that they may very well also feel something that you do. The artist has honed their skills and made public their art to communicate that feeling. In doing so, and having you be conscious and reflective, they are not so alone with the feeling and neither are you. There is something spiritual about this, something deeply human.
    This is not a one way street. Consider me at the coffee shop as I look up from the keyboard. The distanced look on a listener’s face, or the smile, or the body movement with the rhythm, all of it telling me that the emotion I am creating is getting through. I can see it rebounding back to me.
    I have had parallel experiences in sharing my short stories. Readers often reply with a past personal experience that the story had brought to mind. Typically these experiences were emotionally significant for them. The feeling they had in reading the story became a bridge for that emotional memory to cross back into conscious awareness.
    At first I was offended by this. Silly me. I just wanted the reader to be impressed by my story, to say how realistic and impactful it was. Now, in accepting that my story became an affect bridge for the reader, I realize that a greater success has been achieved.
    Even though I communicate the emotional experience within me (through a jazz riff or a plot twist) the end goal is not that my listener/reader knows me better as a result, but they know themselves better. We will both benefit from the solace of companionship in that shared emotional experience but ultimately there is a greater good possible for my art, be it musical or literary. That good is to lead the listener/reader to greater self-awareness, celebration or exploration of past experiences, and a harmony of past and present.
    This raises our experience of art above that of entertainment. Entertainment seeks us to be amused or distracted from who we are. We can come to crave its relief from the work of living and acting with integrity and insight. As such, entertainment is addictive.
    But art nudges us to a greater depth. Art leads us to know ourselves and the world around us better.
    There is an old truism about art: I know it when I see it. Perhaps we can re-work that a bit … I know it’s art when it helps me see me in a deeper, more insightful way.

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What are you doing here?
      There are a couple of dozen of you, I can tell that from the analytics on my website. I don’t know who most of you are, but every month this page gets that many hits.
       Anyway, I know what I’m doing here. I’m trying to figure things out. Writing helps me do that.
      Here in this blog I connect things, make sense of this time in my life and what happened in the forty years leading up to it. I put hours into each blog. I really want it to flow easily for you so the reading doesn’t get in the way of the feeling. But most of all I want you to make some sense from it too, have you to reflect on things you’ve experienced.
      Most of my time I write in stories. I watch with my mind’s eye to see what happens to my characters. I listen with my mind’s ear to hear what they have to say. However, it’s only when I step back and take a second look that I realize what those stories are really about. So, for this month’s blog, I’m going to write about that.
      Consider this scenario. A very conservative, religious older couple adopts a parrot who has been taught to swear in both official languages by the sailors down at the marina. It’s a great place to start a short story. But that’s not all the story is about. It is also about grace and about the hardest of hearts being able to soften and grow. It’s a very funny story, folk who’ve read it tell me they chuckled all the way through. Even I can’t read it aloud without breaking into laughter. (I’ll send it to you if you send me an email asking for it… more about that at the end of the blog).
      Or another. An old piano tuner contends with the impact that the rooms the pianos reside in and the people who play them has on the wellness of the piano. Harshness in conversations taking place in the piano’s presence deposits bitterness on the strings. But the real story is about healing and finding solace in the most unlikely of relationships.
      And again, yet another story premise. A boy raised with the notion that he can be anything he wants to be in life finds that life is not about achievement and success but is about something entirely different. He learns this from, of all things, a dog.
      Reflecting on these short stories I identify themes of companionship, healing, breaking the oppression of conventionality, finding peace in connecting to well-meaning others. These themes sneak their way in beneath the turns of plot and the depictions of character. They are visitors from my subconscious, not deliberately included but naturally cropping up in the lives of my characters.
      In the forty years of my work as a psychotherapist it was those very things that brought wellness and eased suffering for my clients. 
      I’m more explicit about these themes in my blogs. Perhaps that’s why the couple of dozen of you keep coming back. I want my writing, blogs and fiction, to offer a respite from the noxious elements of the cultural context around us. Ours is a culture far too saturated with entitlement, greed, and intolerance.
      Here in Canada, much of our cultural context is imported from the behemoth of our southern neighbour: American news commentary floods us with a tsunami of outrage; dramatic entertainment depicts murderous or abusive acts; slickly produced horror, lust, and greed are served up to distract us from the mundane of our lives; humour too often demeans another person; competition is glorified over creating or cooperating. All this media is propelled by the engine of capitalism. Advertisements necessitate possessions and convince us that somehow we all have the right to our consumptions. It’s no wonder that on the American networks we also see so many advertisements for mental health drugs.
      This daily media diet consumes us. It can stop us seeing what can break through in tiny little moments, things like grace and gratitude and generosity of both spirit and resources, that which can humanize human nature.
      So, that’s what I write about.
      I’ve just finished a re-write of a major novel. It’s about emotional healing, healing taking place in spite of adverse circumstances, healing brought into being by a loving community around the central character. It’s the novel that is closest to my heart because of courage and a relentless drive toward wellness that comes from within for the main character.
      Did I mention it’s the novel closest to my heart? Well, I was wrong. It’s almost the closest. There is another. This other novel, completed and currently being edited, is a collection of short stories. Each of the stories revolves around a single character: some from his childhood, others depicting his befuddled senior years. Some of them are pretty funny. All of them are poignant. This novel is my spiritual memoir set in the lives of fictional characters doing totally fictional things. But it is about me, especially the religious aspect of my childhood. And it is about human kindness and caring and being salvaged and being loved.
      There’s no sensationalism in these novels and short stories. There is no outrage … well, maybe just a little in the form of irony. I’m sure that some of these stories will make you cry (they still do for me) and some will make you laugh out loud and most will make you think your way deeper into the human condition as wonderful as it can be.
      And maybe that is what you hope for in my monthly blog, in this smooth five minute read that plays away at the edge of your mind and wiggles into the softness of your heart.
      And just maybe you might have a hankering to read one of those short stories too (or a pre-publication version of the novels). If so, send me an email at wilton@twiltondale.ca.
    

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It’s been dark out there. Really dark.
      I start writing these blogs about three weeks in advance of their posting. Count it back. This blog, posted mid January, had its first writing within a day or two of winter solstice. Indeed, it was dark back then. Darker than it is now. Over the last couple of months two of my three daily walks with my Great Pyrenees, Lady, have been in the blackest of night. At my side in her thick white coat, my Lady has been a loyal and protective ghost.
      So today, I post a blog about about darkness.
      We celebrate the light. The celebration of light is a focus of many of the world’s religions: Dewali for the Hindus, the lighting of the candles at Hanukkah for the Jewish people, within the Christian religion the coming of the Christ as bringing light into the darkness.
      But why does darkness itself get a bad rap?
      Perhaps it takes the arts to help us to appreciate darkness for its beauty. In literature and cinema we use the word dark to characterize malevolent elements. In writing fiction, these darker elements propel the plot and give occasion for central characters to act with courage, grace and love. In An Incoming Tide, there are three faces of evil: a narcissist, a psychopath, and a pathetic but violent ne’er-do-well. Between them they wreak much harm on the other characters. As a reader, you identify with those other characters as they are impacted by these destructive personality types, realizing your own intention to bring the best of yourself into a sometimes difficult world.
      We can extend this characterization to music. I am conscious of musical elements of darkness as a composer of jazz music. There’s the sadness of the minor chords and the chaos of the dissonant ones. Indeed a common harmonic structure is named the devil’s interval. Strike those two notes together and a shiver goes up your spine, your mouth goes dry. That name, and the use of this chilling harmony in many genres of music, goes back hundreds of years.
      What transforms these dark elements into the pleasing quality of jazz is their resolution. A dissonant chord resolves very nicely into a minor chord. When that happens it doesn’t feel sad at all, but restful and reflective. The sadness of minor chords can resolve into their related majors, augmented nicely with other notes from the scale. That resolution provides a sense of peaceful wellbeing. As I work harmonic structures underneath my melody lines I shift my listener from the tension of the dissonant chaos into the repose of resolution and wellness.
      I come upon these creative ventures into darkness and light, in dissonance and resolution, after spending decades in the therapy room as a psychologist. The sadness of loss and the anxiety of chaos were an hourly occurrence there. Client stories were saturated with accounts of others treating them with mindless inconsideration, abusive self-indulgence, arrogant dismissal, destructive greed … pretty much the gamut of the darker sides of human nature. The residual emotional pain and confusion felt by my clients as they grappled with this darkness formed the foundation of our talks together.
      Then, together we would work to find resiliency, resolve and resolution.
​      Remember me mentioning Lady at the beginning of this blog? She came into our lives after being rescued, chained up in a backyard, apparently neglected. It took her a long time to realize she could trust us. From the beginning we saw signs of her having been abused; she still shies away from quick movement of feet, has trouble with men coming close.
    As a Great Pyrenees she carries breed characteristics of being protective, independent and stubborn. She is a big dog: we figure around 100 pounds of muscle strength. Lady’s behaviour around other dogs and strangers suggests that she was never properly socialized in her early years. Her past creates quite a challenge on the city walks I share with her and when visitors come into our home. Funny how all that is so similar to the clients that came into my office, client’s harmed in their childhood lives.
    For my part, I need to be the source of resolution for her, calming her and reassuring her that we are a team in meeting the vicissitudes of her life now. For her part, she is loyal and affectionate and goofy and claims her space as a family member in our home. After previously having Golden Retrievers and Border Collies, Lady has redefined for us what it means to have companionship with a dog. I particularly like the way that she first stares at me a while before responding to a command, apparently thinking over whether or not she will comply. Often she decides she won’t be bothered. But it is oh-so satisfying when she does come over to me after I’ve called her; she has thought about it, and decided that such would be okay with her.
    Back at the top, I described Lady as a loyal and protective ghost at my side walking through the dark of the mid-winter night. After writing the blog, I know that I am the same for her (although not dressed in a thick white fur coat as is she).
    We face the dark together: together like the characters in my fiction who find they can be motivated by higher values as they endure the darker sides of human nature; together like the listeners to my music who with me find resolution after the chaos of dissonant harmonies; together like the clients who had the courage to bring their stories of hurt and harm to my therapy office so we could together witness the miracle of healing.
    Together, like you and I are now in reading these words written at the darkest time of the year, finding within them companionship and hope.
 

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Recently I had the experience of playing alongside of a couple of other musicians. They were excellent. And given how excellent they were, I ended up coming to terms with something about me and my own approach to musical performance.
    We were taking turns as solo musicians for a three hour gig, providing background music to an arts gala. A couple of hundred people came through the venue, talking to the artists and eating some really great food. It was quite the evening. Even though we were just there to add ambience, some folk even stopped to listen to our music.
    But first, let me tell you about the other two musicians. One was another pianist. His touch on my digital piano was gentle but oh-so-very disciplined. He played some jazz, popular songs, even Christmas music as it was that time of year. The other was a jazz guitarist, performing really well in the style of the iconic Chet Atkins. Both of them held steady to the beat. Furthermore, I never heard a single error as they played, their eyes following along the written music in front of them.
    So … now I have a confession to make: I was envious of those other two musicians. I was envious of how disciplined they were, how well practiced, how precise.
    And then I wasn’t. The envy went away.
    Let me explain.
    During my sets, I occasionally made mistakes and once or twice (or maybe more) got lost as to where I was in the music, needing to improvise back into the song to be able to pick it up again. That made for some awkward moments. Oh, and my rhythm was all over the place: reflective of my typical struggle with a sense of time.
     While I was playing my mind occasionally went missing, but missing in a weirdly wonderful way. It went exploring for new meaning and new emotional connections within my music. I’ve been playing those pieces for months, some for years, and yet there seemed to be something new within them as I played that night.
    I often play with my eyes closed so my mind can just be with the music, centred on the  emotions it conveys. Of course, at times I have to have my eyes open to watch my fingers navigate the keyboard. However, for some reason that night I sensed that there was reason to look up.
    What I saw was extraordinary: I saw someone standing there, intently listening. This actually happened a few times but I retain a strong memory of one such occasion. What I saw on that listener’s face was a sense of her also being inside the music, in there along with me.
    A form of emotional communication was happening between us, a synchronicity mediated by my music. Perhaps for a few moments neither of us felt alone with the emotions we were feeling. At least, on my part, I didn’t. While I can’t be sure what it was like for her, for me it felt like a deep connection. Because I play only original compositions the emotions contained within those pieces originate from within me. For her also to be caught up with them created a moment of deep companionship: she and I sharing those feelings together.
    There were times like this in my practice as a psychologist, times of emotional synchronicity with my client. It was more than just acknowledgement of the feelings of my client, more than just being a good observer for non-verbal emotional cues: it was the felt experience of the client’s emotions within me. I was subjectively experiencing the client’s chaos or despair, identical to how I feel those emotions when they arise in the circumstances of my own life.
    But something else was going on as well. The client was feeling something back, something from inside of me. My clients told me about this when they returned to therapy after I hadn’t seen them for a while. They said they came back because of what they had felt when they’d been in before. They mentioned feelings of safety, of hope, of wellbeing. I suspect that as much as I felt their distress in those moments of emotional synchronicity, they felt the optimism, the calm assurance and the wellness from within me.
    This sharing of subjective experience didn’t always happen in my work as a psychotherapist. It wasn’t the only helpful, healing, sort of thing that occurred in the therapy room. Indeed there are approaches to psychotherapy that don’t include it at all, approaches that are objectively prescriptive in terms of assessment, diagnosis and treatment. The phenomenon of subjective emotional connection doesn’t figure into how they purport to work.
    I’m deeply grateful that both ways exist … for music and for therapy. The performance of music by the other two musicians at the gala was a great fit for some folk. They loved the recognizable tunes, remembering their own meaningful moments with those songs. I could tell by watching them listen. And, I’m sure the objectively defined therapies fit for some types of clients. They must because when they are tested in clinical trials positive results for their effectiveness was demonstrated.
    As both consumers and providers (of the arts and therapy) we sort ourselves out according to what works for us, what helps us most fully be ourselves … our best selves.
    Seeking out what works and what doesn’t helps us navigate the worlds of beauty, and of grace, and of both perplexity and sorrow, of fear and joy. That night, I came to more deeply acknowledge and accept what works for me. And, I came to see it needn’t be prescribed for everyone else. Those other two musicians are truly great in being the type of musician they are.
    We can delight in the capacity for difference between us; humans are just that interesting. The greater our acceptance of difference, the more we can experience safety, peace and belonging with, and beside, each other.

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Sometimes while playing jazz at the coffee shop, what I hear coming from my piano is just a bunch of notes.
    Sometimes though, it’s music.
    I always strive for it to be music but far too frequently that isn’t the case. You see, at times I get distracted. Folk might wave at me, all friendly like, and I smile back as I play. Typically then I stumble a bit, take a phrase or two find my place again. But even when I get back into it, it’s lost its sense of musicality. Sometimes it doesn’t even take someone distracting me; my mind just does that mind thing of not staying where it should. The notes carry on but the music has stopped.
    I’m trying to deal with this problem by giving myself frequent reminders. I say to myself make it music today, Terry. And when I very deliberately put my mind there, and force it to be only there, I’m able to do it. Melody and meaning interlace together.
    I suspect that most others don’t hear that difference between when it is music and when it’s just notes. But I do, and it bothers me. It feels like I have the concentration span of my Great Pyrenees dog, Lady, walking on a windy day.
    And that, unfortunately, is pretty short.   
    
This time in my life has been one of reflection. It’s been going on now over four years after my career as a psychologist which lasted over forty. And I remember that sometimes when I was in the middle of a psychotherapy session it was like music. You can extend that metaphor for yourself with notions of great timing and interpersonal harmony and a sense of emotional meaning.
    Unfortunately, other times it was just a bunch of assessment questions and theoretically correct therapeutic interventions. I probably did those things convincingly. They might have sounded sincere and insightful. But, alas, it was a going through the motions sort of thing.
    As a writer now, I can employ the metaphor of this being about mind and heart. When I’m playing jazz and just notes are coming out, the heart part is absent and the mind goes somewhere automatic. And sometimes back when I was providing psychotherapy my heart would be absent, like I was too tired or something, and my mind just went to all of my education and training that told me how I ought to do it.
    Let’s think music first.
    There’s a rhythm machine on my digital piano. It can even put that beat into in a guitar and bass accompaniment. Using the canned rhythm track I could play the melody line and people would be able to dance to my music. There are all sorts of different rhythms to indulge in there, like rock and folk and calypso.
    I guess…. could, if I wanted to.
    However, the relentlessness of the canned beat means there can be no variation in tempo, no place for the heart to speed up a bit in excitement or slow down in reflection. You know, that truly human stuff. I used to think that if I added in the canned rhythm I would be playing someone else’s music while claiming it to be my own, not really being honest as a musician. Now, I don’t think it’s music at all. It’s just a contrived sense of what music is, stripped of a human being conveying what it means to feel and make meaning.
    And shifting to the profession of psychology, the whole notion of taking the heart out was very popular in the culture of psychotherapy as my career progressed. Understanding the suffering and struggles of a person was to be all about tick boxes for symptoms to fulfill criteria for a psychiatric diagnosis. Treatment was about following the protocols of approved therapy models.
    Toward the end of my career I felt a strong compulsion to view psychotherapy as creating occasion for sharing the human condition within all of us, clients and practitioners alike: its suffering, celebrations, stories, misgivings, confusions, missteps and delights. Obviously, we focused on those aspects of the client’s life, structured the time for their benefit. But they would know I experience that human condition too. Thankfully, I found other psychotherapists who also shared this humanistic perspective on the field. However, the institutions guiding and regulating the profession held fast: practitioners were to stay within the practices of objectifying diagnosis, scientifically vetted treatment protocols and an evolving imbroglio of ethical guidelines. We were there to consider clients as disordered or deficient, and ourselves as technicians doling out proven treatments. Complementary roles.
    The prevailing notion was that university based research knew far better what my client needed than did my empathy, sensitivity, open-heartedness and compassion. Psychotherapy wasn’t supposed to be about the psychologist as a caring presence engaged in a subjectively meaningful way with the suffering person. Indeed, perhaps it could even be dangerous if we presumed to take our humanity into the therapy room: a forbidden sort of relationship might develop. Instead we were to take in what could be standardized and objectively documented, the canned rhythms built into the profession. No place for the heart to speed up in excitement or slow down in reflection.
    So what difference does it make for you to read this? Can I suggest you try a little experiment? What I’m asking is that you become aware of little instances of humanity that might break through in your experiences today. Perhaps it will be a smile involving the eyes as well as the mouth, or a an unexpected warmth in a service provider who sees you as a person rather than a task or problem. Or maybe you could come to hear me play some Saturday at the coffee shop and listen for when the music breaks through.

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About Endings

​I have a confession to make, something still niggling at me from back when I was working as a psychologist. I never was very good at ending the therapeutic relationship after the healing and recovery had taken hold. We were supposed to be able to … you know, be able to say to people that they were all better now and that they didn’t need to come to sessions anymore.
            There were crutches that the mental health industry provided to help us navigate termination (yes, that’s what we in the profession called it!). Sometimes agencies or third party funders would limit the number of sessions that a person could have. That made it easy. And sometimes there were supervisors who were happy to be the boogie men, relishing saying when the deed had to be done.
            Occasionally, a person didn’t come back for a scheduled session. Back when I was working for a government agency if a client failed to come to three scheduled appointments in a row the file was to be closed. If that client wanted services again, they had to go back through the intake procedure all over again, perhaps just to be triaged out. Some therapists were better at having their clients cancel or not show up than I was.
            What seemed to work the best for me was to have the active stage of therapy fade backward in time by making sessions further and further apart. Doing so felt like I was just becoming less relevant rather than dismissive or abandoning.
            I often posed a question to my clients: How will we know when we are done? They never posed it back to me. But at least my asking the question suggested that there was such a thing as done-ness in the therapy biz. I think it helped a bit, nudging us toward the decision that we didn’t need to rebook but the client could call back if the need arose again.
            Now you might be wondering why I would ever be remembering this now, four years later.
            It’s because as a writer now I need to get good at ending things. The publisher for An Incoming Tide was pretty clear that a book of the type I was writing needed to finish off around 300 pages or so. That was about price and marketability. Short story contests tell me how many words are allowed. One contest gives a grace allotment of 100 words over the limit, which is kind of gracious.
            And once the story is told, an author needs to consider how to get the reader out of it. Will the loose threads be wrapped up? If so, how neatly? Should there be an ending that leaves a feeling of contentment and resolution? What about leaving things hanging a bit, or even setting up a sequel? Perhaps there might be a twist 90% of the way through the story, something the reader doesn’t expect but makes a lot of sense in its own way. That approach can provide an unexpected but satisfying ending.
            By the way, I have a pretty interesting ending on laugh-out-loud humorous story I have just written. Quite touching actually. I can send that story out to you if you send me an email at wilton@twiltondale.ca.
           
I mention this because we all happen to be living with an uncertain ending. I’m more aware of it now, cruising along in my eighth decade of life.
            Illness and natural causes typically allow one a slow, if not dignified ending. Fatal injury could truncate a life leaving lots of loose threads for others to try to tie up. And one could always DYI the ending of life through suicide. Unfortunately, that’s really hard on those left with the loose ends … not fair to them at all.
            I grew out of a religious tradition that dealt with death by promising an beatific afterlife: not for everybody of course, just for those who put their faith in the right theological system.
            There are other spiritual thoughts around endings, like for all things there is a season. I like the notion of life being about periods of ascendance, sustaining, and dissipation. We see patterns in nature of germination, blooming and dying off. I hope for a composting of the self I leave behind: the memories of the loves that I’ve shared, and the kindnesses I’ve shown, left to nurture others as they continue their own time-limited journey.
           
The short stories I’m writing these days give me lots of practice with ending things before I slam headfirst into the word count limits. I’m practicing doing those little plot twists, writing in some irony to leave readers with a bit of something to muse over.
            By the way, I never know what the ending is going to be when I start a piece of fiction. I start with a premise, characters, some of the possible plot elements. Then I write to find out where it will go. In that, writing fiction is quite a bit like living one’s life.
            As an author, I hope to do something more than just entertain. Just perhaps, what I write might plunge the reader into some exploration of meaning, the recognition that whether one ever thinks of it or not, we all are caught up in the same existential plight. It is only true courage, wisdom and honesty that enables us to face our endings without the crutches of denial or avoidance.  
            This blog is coming to an end. Will there be a twist?
            I can’t think of one.

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It happened a number of times over the course of my career as a psychologist.
            Folk would say that they’d just told me something they’d never shared with anyone else. It was one of those unique privileges and responsibilities I had a mental health professional. In the room, there was a deep sense of trust and safety. My client and I were together on sacred ground.
            But there was yet a different phenomenon that also ushered in a similar sense of intimacy to the work. Often I would subjectively experience the emotional state of the client in front of me, feel it with as much vividness and immediacy as I felt my own emotions. It would come as a flash, typically as a sudden overwhelming sense of sadness. It was different from a deliberate fostering of empathy for my client or the insightful reading of facial cues and body language. It was spontaneous, unbidden and totally emotional.
            The neuroscientists have a way of describing this phenomenon, reducing it down to their level of analysis. They identify it as arising within the mirror neuron system of the brain. You might be interested in looking that up. As is the case for all reductionistic explanations, their idea was intriguing at first and then a bit of an emotional let-down thereafter: a complex and important gift of being human explained rather than held in reverence.
              Such reductionism is the well-fondled prize of psychology: the ability to postulate things like complexes, or diagnoses, or brain structures, or reproducible phenomena. And while it was useful (I guess), it always missed the point. As soon as we objectify something, we otherize it. Otherizing it leads us to dismiss, devalue, discredit and destroy: this rather than to feel a sense of transcendence and awe.
            You as a reader of fiction, and me as an author, get to experience this emotional synchronicity as well. You get it when you subjectively experience the internal emotional state of a character in a compelling work of fiction. Tears might spring forth from your eyes in the midst of a sad event. Disgust might erupt, or revulsion even, as a character you’ve identified with is treated in an evil way by another character. You might feel befuddled by a situation, or panic, much like a character is. But before you knew it was happening, those characters and those events were no longer words on the page in front of you. They were alive within you as a reader.
            As an author this experience in the reader is what I am aiming for.
            But as an author, it is also what drives me to do the crazy work of writing. And then subsequently, to do the hard work of self-editing. It becomes a compulsion. The muse implants a character and context into my mind, as I write I feel what that character feels. The process takes me a bit deeper into what it means to be human. Typically, the writing just blurts its way out onto my MacBook screen. Subsequently in the editing, I must look critically at the words on the screen to polish the text that conveys that subjective sense of emotion and meaning, to chisel away the words that don't.
            In the process, the characters are as real to me as were the clients and colleagues years ago. I learn from them, learn what is within me, revealed by what is within them.          
            Currently I’m rewriting a novel, shifting it from the perspective of a third person narrator to a first person account. It’s a lot of work. That might not make much sense to you. The plot and the characters are all still the same. But instead of watching it happen as a detached observer, I’m writing (and you will be reading) the story as it is experienced inside the head and the heart of the main character. There’s a world of difference. Some of that difference is technical, what I need to do as an author for the first person narration to have integrity. But most of the difference is phenomenological, how the whole thing will be experienced by the reader.
            This re-write gets me, and you as the reader, onto that sacred ground, emotions in sync.  
            Good fiction does more than entertain us or allow us to escape who we are. It sinks us deep into the human condition: the human condition of the characters in the story, but into the human condition of ourselves as well.
            Perhaps you might consider reading the short stories linked on the hmmm… page of this website. Ask yourself: what do I feel within and thus understand better about myself as I read each story? The Peter story talks about the sense of reliance we have on others, the absolute panic that can come when we think that’s threatened. The Four of us story reminds us that bad things can push us in different directions. The Scroll of Alphaeus story reminds us of the longing we have for something transcendent and the sense of doubt that can go along with it.
            I’m going to give you a key to getting there. And I know what I am going to suggest is hard, like learning a new yoga pose or taking up a sport in late middle age. I want you to imagine that the work of fiction you are reading has been written by an author, a real human being (you can do this now, won’t be able to in a few years when AI has taken over). What are those characters, their dilemmas and delights, telling you about the author’s unique personal experience of the human condition?
            And then, what is it revealing about yours?

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When I read the principle in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers it made a lot of sense to me. It was the one about 10,000 hours of dedicated practice leading to mastery.
            It certainly seemed true in my previous vocation of psychotherapy. Getting those 10,000 hours would take five or ten years. Not only in providing the psychotherapy, but also doing it with diligent self-reflection and critical thought about how it was being done. Good psychotherapy could never be about what books one had read or what conferences one had attended or what model of therapy one practiced. It was about the psychologist being capable to self-reflect on that experience of providing therapy in a constructive and responsible way.
            I worked the profession for over forty years, put in that 10,000 hours several times over. I can only hope that it was with sufficient dedication, discipline and self-reflection to have approached mastery. Then I jumped to an entirely different endeavour, that of writing fiction. I had to start all over again, learn a new set of skills, master an entirely different art, start down the road of a different 10,000 hours.
            Which means once again I must tolerate not being particularly good at what I’m doing. I have to look at what I write with that keenly critical eye and I need to keep that internal criticality constructive rather than letting it discourage me.
            A year ago I entered a writer’s contest and placed well: ninth of 567 entries. Way back then I hadn’t yet put in my 10,000 hours of short story writing, no way even close to it. But the contest administrators must have found something of value in what I wrote. You can read that story at The four of us (clickable link).
            The contest, much like psychotherapy, requires one’s creativity and skill to be practiced within constraints. The Writer’s Playground criteria require the writer to choose between five different characters, five different potential contexts for the story setting and to include a mandatory element as a part of the story. The contest gives one only 10 days to complete the challenge: 10 days to come up with a workable premise, do the writing, self-edit the piece to make it readable and compelling.
            And again last spring I entered a story again in a subsequent edition of the contest. I didn't place. And I had thought the story a good one, was particularly proud of it. I like the story well enough to include it on my website. You might want to check out The Scroll of Alphaeus (clickable link).
            I have two self-published novels out there. They are kind of like the poor folk who happened to do therapy with me before I put in the 10,000 hours of dedication to the practice. There are flaws within each of the novels: stilted writing, errant handling of things like point-of-view and plot development. In each of the novels though, there are promises of a coming craft. One of my friends identifies my first novel A Greater Good as being my most compelling writing. I suspect that there were some great moments in the first years of practice as a psychotherapist as well. Just not mastery.
            So what does one do with being still on the not-yet end of the 10,000 hour process? To enter the professional psychology field a certain amount of mandatory supervision is required (that wasn’t the case when I started 45 years ago). For my writing, there are editors from whom I can purchase critical feedback on my work. I have generous beta-readers who help me enormously with their graciousness in reading and commenting on stories (and you could be one too!). Email me if you are interested.
            But it requires the maturity to be self-critical, to keep editing and polishing, always asking myself whether the words that have popped onto my page are sufficiently engaging for me to subject a reader to them. But not only the words, but also the ideas. I must constantly ask whether what I have written might further the reader’s insight into human nature, might help the reader to come to terms with something similar that happened to them.
            It is difficult to be the judge of that, to be hard on myself while I try to rein in the flights of delight that come when the muse implants a peculiarly compelling scenario into my mind. And that’s the carefulness of still putting in that 10,000 hours to achieve mastery: it’s not just the hours, but the attitude toward those hours to make the writing beneficial for the reader.  
            I have no idea how many hours into this I am. I can only hope that however far along I am, I’m pursing this art of writing with sufficient diligence, critical self-reflection and dedication to the purity of the art. I write for the sake of telling my characters’ stories. But I write to walk along with my readers in gaining insight into the human condition, understanding it in a way that gives hope, grace and wisdom. It’s a worthy path to walk together.
             
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I have been meaning to write this blog for months. And then, the USA Supreme Court comes along with a ruling and prompts me again. But first …
            I’ve kept up with some former colleagues, still tracking the ideological course of my previous profession. They tell me the process for psychologists maintaining competence requires them to formulate SMART goals in their professional development plans and then document the attainment of those goals. By the way, SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Pursuing goals of this nature seems to be quite a trend these days. No let me re-think that. Trend? No, that’s not right. Pervasive.
            And, because no one seems to question the wisdom of this, I will.
            Just how smart is this SMART? Perhaps one’s goals can be both suitably SMART and at the same time, not very smart at all.
            Consider a corporation that has the goal of maximizing shareholder profit. To do so, they realize that the exploitation of the environment, legal maneuvers to avoid taxation and, paying the lowest possible wages are key to making a great return to its shareholders. Yup, all of those strategies can be SMART-a-sized. But for the wellbeing of the planet and its citizenry, such an approach is not very smart at all.
            Decades ago while working for a government mental health agency my performance was measured in terms of cases closed. My boss suggested that each year I go for 10% more. That goal was certainly SMART-able. But I noticed that within the agency most cases were closed because clients failed to show up for appointments. Of course, this could’ve been because the clients got better. However, there could have been other explanations for clients not coming back: for example, therapists could have been ineffectual so clients didn’t return because what they received wasn’t helping; or, perhaps agency policies focused more on the security and smooth functioning of the agency rather than the wellness of the clientele. SMART and not-very-smart was a distinct possibility.
            Consider a pharmaceutical company marketing a drug that treats a particular symptom. Due to adverse effects, that drug might compromise quality of life, or even length of life for that matter, but still be oh-so-SMART at getting itself established as product for the company. For example, the drugs developed to reduce anxiety and control pain typically carry dependency risks which create their own problems for the user. The development and marketing of these drugs could be SMART but in terms of consumer health, and societal health as well, they really are not smart at all.
            Back in its day the Indian Residential School system probably was pretty SMART in accomplishing colonialization goals. Now we are locating the bones of dead children in its fields. What about the use of coal to produce cheap energy? I’m sure that was really SMART too … of course, setting the forest fires and heat waves aside. How about building a nuclear power plant on an earthquake and tsunami prone coastline? I could go on, but I will let you as reader generate your own list.
             The question is … if the focus is on SMART what other possible motivations for establishing priorities get lost? What do we lose when we only think in terms of the specific, measurable and time-bound? What lies out in the range of the General, Unmeasurable, Aspirational, Divergent and Ongoing?  (Unfortunately, as an acronym GUADO just doesn’t have the panache of SMART!).
            When we think only in terms of objectives and the objectifiable we can end up focusing away from the wise, the respectful, the compassionate, the sustainable. We end up valuing outcome over process, product over presence, near term over long. Numbers over people.
            So back to that ruling of the US Supreme Court. It declared affirmative action unconstitutional. One of the justifications given for the decision was that the affirmative action policy didn’t accomplish the goal of its endeavour. Presumably, some SMART criteria was left unattained so the whole thing should be scrapped. Is justice really the achieving of particular social goals as formulated by the privileged and powerful?
            But what about the GUADOs of affirmative action? Has it brought to greater consciousness and a broader understanding of American history? Has it lifted some people out of poverty through the realization of their talents and gifts? Has it stimulated divergent thought that challenges narrow views of what is justice and peace?
            So now, as I am wont to do in this blog, I shift from the persona of a psychologist (and apparently a social commentator, too) to that of a writer and musician. Which brand of smart do I want to culture my creative intentions?
            If I want to be SMART about writing fiction, there are some steps that I can take. I can buy the self-help books on how to write a successful novel in 15 days, take the workshops, do the schmoozing at literary galas, get active again on Twitter to broaden my network of contacts, research agents and editors interested in my funds. I could make a list of tasks, review it weekly or quarterly (yearly would be too long, I think).
            Or I could observe what is beautiful around me, notice what is meaningful in relationships, find the quirkiness in human nature, be disciplined around taking that sober second, third and twentieth look at my work for readability and impact … hmmm, perhaps recognize that there is peace, presence and exuberance in my dog despite the fact that she can neither speak a single English word nor hum a jazz riff.  
            Those of you who know me or have read my blogs will know which direction fits for me. And you know this will be quite an on-going process, not likely wrapped up in the next year. But just maybe you’ll want to stay tuned in as I go.

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