I work with people struggling through life (mwallistherapy.com) and this book is written for them. Over the last 30 years I’ve built a structure that explains humans in all their wonder, and their not-so-wonderful moments. It uses science to make sense of the difficulties we’re facing, as individuals and as communities, in our information-rich world.
There’s a pull most of us know, a yearning for simpler times. Think of a life before this information flood: a village that wakes to the same hills each morning, work done with the hands, everyone known by name, the same faces round the fire each night. The seasons turn as they always have, the work that feeds you today is the work that fed you yesterday, and the mind knows roughly what’s coming because the world keeps its shape.
While it was not an easy life, there was something in it that made it a good one: it let you recover. The grief ran its course, the fear found its place, the work wore you out and you woke recovered, ready for another day. The hardship finished, even if it started again the next day.
This book is about what’s been lost – the ability to recover; a mind matched to a world. It isn’t a destination, it’s a direction, and we’re all, more or less, pointed toward it.
Recovery is the key to a sense of security and safety. It is the pathway to living in a world of beauty and harsh realities, of variation and change. This is the gift of recovery: a world that responds the way your mind expects, where what you do lands the way you knew it would, where the ground keeps its shape long enough to learn. Wherever the pattern holds and the learning resolves, there it is – a sense of belonging, each to the other: we are of our world, and our world is of us. What we ache for isn’t the easy life. It’s the life that lets us recover.
I am in the midst of writing this book, and every name on the waitlist gives me support to continue. If you’d like to know when it’s ready, you can join the waitlist, or if you are just curious about the book, feel free to ask a question.