All children love the unknown, the surprise in the wrapping, the thrill of knocking on a door on Halloween, the amazement of sticking your tongue out for the new taste and texture called snow. You have a child inside you whom you promised once that you wouldn’t grow old, a child who is waiting and waiting for something new to happen. Each time you change it up, do something slightly different, the joy of the unknown returns. It brings with it the sense of time stopping no matter what is happening in the wider world.

The remark I hear most often from our graduates is this: I have become comfortable in my own skin. The paradox of this remark from a Gestalt perspective is that only by allowing myself to be uncomfortable in my skin am I truly living life.

My former colleague JoAnne Greenham used to say that some of us were born with a clown in their head. In this way we recognize one another — one of us puts on a rubber clown nose in the middle of an argument and the other stops arguing to guffaw.
 
One of the values of our training at the GIT is a sense of humour, and this seems to be a rare commodity – bestowed by genes and circumstance on some and forbidden to others.

What does it mean to you to be depressed? And how would you compare that to the experience of being joyful? For most of us the experience of being down is one to be avoided and the experience of being up is one to hold onto for as long as we can, often keeping ourselves “up” long beyond the passage of the joy inducing stimulus. To be down is to be down on ourselves, and it’s best endured alone, away from the judgment of others. We seek diagnosis and definition for the state of depressing, but we don’t seek the same for joy – it just is.

When I was a child (a million years ago) there was a television commercial for aspirin. It showed a mother taking a stress break from her day by taking an aspirin and lying down on a cot in blissful serenity. Even then I knew that what she really needed was a break and the aspirin was the excuse to take one. Now I and everyone I know live in a world where stress is the norm. I can’t remember the last time I took a simple lie down in the middle of the day (as compared to a crash after overwhelm).