There’s a paradox in blogging about counselling. The heart of what I do must always remain hidden. I can write endlessly about those moments before I enter session. Those moments when I’m on UBC campus before I go into Clinic. The wind is cold on my face. I walk to the top of the Rose Garden, under the tall flagpole with the Maple Leaf flag, look out over Burrard Inlet, and the snow-capped mountains up Howe Sound. Above me, two eagles, slipping and gliding on the wind, never needing to flap their wings. On Main Mall, on my way back to the Scarfe Building, my boot scuffs on wet leaves, which I kick out of the way. Sudden pinpricks of rain blister on my jacket. I’m thinking of sessions today, of my clients, of a plan that is like no plan I have ever known: a strategy of how to follow, and then to shape, focus, channel but rarely to lead. What will I and my clients trace together, this outline of something that is not yet visible? Which doorways of their lives will they pass through; what rooms will they visit? I breathe slowly, settling, calming myself, trying to gently push those thoughts of the session away for now. And in everything around me the thoughts return. The bare branches of trees poke up into the sky but also downwards, knotting together into a single trunk that roots itself in the earth. The fallen leaves on the flagstones are of different colours: red, yellow, russet brown. They look like stars, hearts, and shields, like scattered props that stories are made from. Some are bright, freshly fallen. Others are close to vanishing, smudges on the path, or skeletons, with veins only left. Then my clients’ stories bubble up from them. The crimson slash of the surface. Then a hidden, warm darkness cut through with gold. Memories that have almost melted away but still leave their mark. A last leaf falls, sudden, nudging against my hand. Time to go now. To the centre, to the counselling room, with a screen in front of me on which, in due course, my client will appear. To a place the story I am telling is not allowed to go.
Yet there are other areas of changes in my life that I can enter, document, and share. As I settle into counselling practice in Clinic, I’ve also been taking a required course in Career Counselling. The area is something that has never appealed to me. As an undergraduate, I think I visited our careers office a couple of times, and picked up a few handouts which I read perfunctorily, and promptly forgot. In mid-career, when I was looking round and assessing where I was, I did a series of tests, mostly following the John Holland schema in which you find out your personality traits, and then are matched to a list of suitable occupations. After much form-filling, it emerged that my most suitable job matches were academic or a librarian, hardly offering me much in the way of possible futures.
Career counselling has, of course, changed markedly now, looking beyond work to the overall sense of a life’s purpose, and often using approaches influenced by sociology, feminism, or ideas about narrative. And so I found the course, and the explorations I was able to do through it, much more stimulating than I’d originally hoped. The older clients I have seen, for instance, are often well past retirement age, and yet work still figures centrally in their lives, give structure, community, and above all purpose. Narrative approaches to counselling would say that these persons are experts in aging, and so they become guides to me as I age, ahead of me on the road but not so far ahead that they are completely out of sight.
In career counselling I’ve been attracted to the theoretical framework of Donald Super, which is based on two dimensions, life span and life space. Life span refers to the arc of one’s life from birth to death. Super’s early work was normative, plotting the final stage, after 65, as “decline”—even his later modification of the category to “disengagement” does not really capture the full sense of what it is to be older and, in many cases, to leave an earlier career behind. Yet the idea of a life arc that may differ for each of us is important, an arc that may at times follow, but will eventually fall away from the ladder of career, that takes into account the body, its disabilities, and the process of ageing. Cutting across this arc of the life span is Super’s notion of life space: the various things that occupy our time and attention from day to day, of which career is only one: family and friends, leisure, the business of living, spiritual and civil engagement. The weighting of these elements changes over the life span. My father told me, in his late eighties, that the business of living now consumed most of his time. It now took so much longer to get up, to get dressed, to walk out to the village to greet people: there was little time for anything else.
Super’s ideas have been useful to me in thinking over my own life. My life now is both more empty than those of most of my classmates, who are still in full-time work, and yet also too full. I am happy with a modest amount of money, and I no longer have to work. And yet I a studying full-time. At the same time, I’m still curious about the academic world of history, literary studies, and other areas that I have partially left behind. Now I have had time at the end of semester, I’ve been reading academic work that has nothing to do with counselling, mostly by a younger generation of scholars, and enjoying it. In the last month I’ve read a stunning manuscript on Sinophone writing in Southeast Asia by Chan Cheow Thia, and two recent, thought-provoking books, Fadzilah Yahaya’s Fluid Jurisdictions, about the place of Arab elite communities in Southeast Asia, and Nicole Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz’s Asian Place, Filipino Nation, which situates the Filipino revolution in a regional and global context. Add to this a number of brilliant articles, including Shaoling Ma’s “Pauses, Cuts, and Static Interference: Media Forms of Merger and Separation in Malaysia and Singapore,” which brings attention to media form to a historical moment, most notably Lee Kuan Yew’s “moment of anguish” speech on Singapore’s separation from Malaysia. I’m writing another article on Singapore’s pace within world literature, stimulated by these and other readings. I do volunteer work with seniors in my community. I write a diary each day, and transform the material from the diary into creative writing. And, increasingly more important than all this, is the growing relationship of care that I have for my partner in late life, and that she has for me.
Perhaps this is where another career counselling concept comes in. Roberta Neault (who is my teacher this semester) and Deidre Pickerell have a model of career engagement in which individuals strive for a sweet spot of engagement, in which they navigate between disengagement because they are overwhelmed, and an equally profound disengagement because they are not challenged at all. So for me it’s a matter of letting things settle, and perhaps letting go, of balancing the challenges I set for myself with my changing capacities. Having time to read, to study, to listen, to care for others, but also to walk on the Mall, to enter that strange, gold-flecked darkness of the self.