The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [26]
Symons preferred a quote from Motivation and Personality, by the psychologist Abraham Maslow, which he had pinned up above the toilet: ‘It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement’.
4.
When Carol returned the following week, she was dressed in a green skirt and T-shirt and seemed a decade younger. Symons apologised for the smell in the room (his wife was making puréed swede with cheesy crust) and suggested that she submit to a small written exercise. He put in front of her three sheets of blank paper headed ‘Things That I Like’, and gave her ten minutes to make a list of everything which came into her head, from the grand to the seemingly inconsequential, while he went off to get them some lemon-and-ginger tea, having always resisted the Freudian injunction against overfamiliarity between therapist and client.
Carol filled in her sheets, often breaking off to look out of the window. She had the strong, almost masculine beauty one might have associated with the wife of a middle-ranking colonial adminstrator in Uganda in the 1920s.
Symons knew that it was hopeless to try to guide people towards more fulfilling vocations simply by discussing with them directly what they might like to do. Concerns about money and status would long ago have extinguished most clients’ ability to think authentically about their options. He preferred for them to return to first principles and free-associate around clusters of concerns that delighted and excited them, without attempting to settle upon them anything as rigid as the frame of a career.
Symons had a metaphor he favoured: in searching for their aptitudes, his clients were to act like treasure hunters passing over the ground with metal detectors, listening out for what he called beeps of joy. A man might get his first intimation that his real interest lay in poetry not by hearing the command of a holy voice as he paged through a book of verse, but from a beep he experienced at the sight of mist over a quiet valley seen from the top of an edge-of-town carpark. Or a politician, long before she belonged to any party or had any profound understanding of statecraft, might register a telling signal when successfully healing a rift between two members of her family.
As it happened, Carol’s beeps turned out to be perplexingly varied. Her reveries about what she liked included visiting old churches, giving presents, making things neat, eating in a fish restaurant set up by a friend in Margate, buying old chairs and reading blogs about economics on the Internet.
Carol and Symons devoted several sessions to interpreting the list, bringing to the task some of the detachment of a pair of archaeologists assigned to study the rubble of an ancient town. The more they talked about the fish restaurant, the clearer it became that it wasn’t the place, in itself, that held any special appeal for Carol; what impressed her was the example of someone who had taken the risk to build a business around a personal interest. Symons took from this exchange the word passion, which he penned on a whiteboard affixed to the back of the door. As for Carol’s love of economics blogs, this was with time revealed to be anchored around an enthusiasm for just one particular example dealing with issues of social entrepreneurship. Symons wrote altruism and business on the board.
Counsellor and client now turned their focus to envy. Symons was a particular admirer of this feeling, and lamented the way that its useful role in alerting us to our possibilities was too often censored out of priggish moralism. Without envy, there could be no recognition of one’s desires. So Symons gave Carol another ten-minute slot to list everyone she most regularly envied – adding on his way out of the room that he didn’t care for niceness and that if there were not at least two names of close colleagues