I often think of the famous question that closes Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day:
Tell me, what are you planning to do?
with your one wild and precious life?
Late capitalism has a knack for bringing beautiful things to life by printing them on mugs, pencil cases and, I don’t know, probably toilet paper. But I’m trying not to let the inevitable Etsyfication destroy that rule for me. It helps to ask it as a sincere question: what shall what you do with your one wild and precious life? What? Instead of a blunt, swirling quote, the sentence becomes a challenge, perhaps the most important question you could ask yourself – the starting signal for thinking about how to build a better life.
I distinctly remember asking myself a similar question over a decade ago when, having just quit my job in journalism to go freelance, I was assigned to portray Fred Sirieix, the charming Frenchman who hosted Channel’s First Dates 4 presents, to interview about the differences between dating in France and in England. It turns out there really aren’t many differences, and from that painfully awkward (and short) conversation I came to the conclusion that I needed to find a new direction for my journalism. I started studying mental health, and it snowballed: I became one psychodynamic psychotherapist I work for the NHS, am a psychoanalytic patient myself – and now your new columnist.
My experiences as a psychotherapist and as a patient have inevitably shaped my thinking about what it means to live better, and I’m excited to explore some of the possibilities. If I had to choose just one, it would be this: learn to listen. It does take some guts – I’ve trained and worked for years and am still a beginner – but I’m not talking about learning in a formal way. Why don’t you try to open your ears and your mind to the people around you, people on the radio, people in books; to take in and try to understand the beautiful, devastating humanity that surrounds us? Notice when you find yourself judging, judging, or taking a side, and ask yourself: why? See if you can listen instead.
One of the many things you’ll learn is this: people are fascinating. Every single one of us. It was thought-provoking for me to learn during my training that if someone is boring, it may be an unconscious defense to keep others away. They are boring not as a passive adjective, but as an active verb: the action of an individual who is petrified because being heard will reveal the truth of what he really feels. Living in fear of being known by others – and of knowing their true selves.
While researching my book When I Grow Up – Conversations with Adults in Search of Adulthood, about how to build a better life from 18 to old age, I learned that one of the most important things you can do to prevent dementia to prevent is: wear a hearing aid if you need one. Exercising regularly, eating healthy, not smoking – they all help, as you might expect, but not as much as a hearing aid. The danger lies not in the physiological change of hearing loss – there is no increased risk if you are deaf but use a hearing aid – but in the loss of the ability to listen. To protect our brain cells from dying, to nourish our minds and live better throughout our lives, we must deepen and enliven our relationships through listening.
It was a man named Miller Reese Hutchison, born in Alabama in 1876, who invented the first electric hearing aid, which he later called the Acousticon. I was moved when I discovered the story behind this innovation: He had a childhood friend, Lyman Gould, who lost his hearing after scarlet fever. Perhaps it was a childhood desire to be heard by his friend and help him that led this remarkable man to invent a device that would change the lives of millions of people.
I believe that to live better, we all need to find our own acoustics. Something that helps us hear not only others, but ourselves – to connect more closely with the parts of ourselves that we often silence through screens, exercise, alcohol, drugs, whatever. I found my acoustics in psychotherapy: receiving it and offering it to other patients. Finding yours can help you develop perhaps the most important foundation for making any change for good: listening – really listening – to your deepest feelings and thoughts. Building a better life starts with being as honest with yourself as possible and listening to whatever you encounter. That life may or may not be wild, but certainly not boring. It is precious and it is your only one.