The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [25]
Three days a week, Symons saw private clients in his house and, on the remaining two, he visited businesses around the country, advising workers about to be laid off or managers who were having difficulty shouldering their responsibilities. He also offered motivational seminars for the unemployed, psychometric testing for interviews and, from a stand at university careers fairs, sessions with graduates preparing to enter the job market.
We agreed that I should observe his working methods over a number of weeks. I would accompany him on his travels and, via a video monitor in the administrative office (with the necessary permissions in hand), observe his consultations with his clients. All he asked in return was that I should recommend him the name of an effective literary agent.
3.
Three days later, I was ensconced in a tight cupboard that served for a study, looking at a black-and-white screen showing the events unfolding in the consulting room next door, where the first client of the day had begun summing up her personal history and professional dissatisfactions with a compelling mixture of formality and honesty. There were papers and files stacked up to the ceiling all around me and, on the floor, a bag of Symons’s sports equipment, emitting the strong smell of recently used gym shoes. The client’s voice could be heard both through the loudspeaker on the monitor and more directly through the walls. It was one of those crystalline, perfectly enunciated English voices, the sort one might acquire growing up in Walton-upon-Thames and graduating with a First in History from Keble College, Oxford. Through a slit in the door, I could see the client’s coat hanging in the hall, a rich blue cashmere garment freckled with water, along with a slim leather briefcase.
Three times the client interrupted her own anecdotes, suddenly pushing back her hair and saying, ‘I’m so sorry, this must be unbearably boring’, to which Symons shot back calmly, as if he had been expecting her to say this all along, ‘I am here only for you’. Twenty minutes into the session, the therapist dropped his voice almost to a whisper and asked, with an avuncular warmth, what had become of the spontaneous and excited child the client must once have been. At which, quite without warning, Carol, thirty-seven years old, a tax lawyer, in charge of a department of forty-five in an office near the Bank of England, began to sob, as Symons watched her with his kindly eyes and, outside, the neighbour’s cat took a stroll around the carp pond.
After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited – long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms – what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true ‘calling’.
This curious and unfortunate term had first come into circulation in a Christian context during the medieval period, in reference to people’s abrupt encounter with an imperative to devote themselves to Jesus’ teachings. But Symons maintained that a secularised version of this notion had survived even into the modern age, where it was prone to torture us with an expectation