I sent an email. The reply began: Thanks for reaching out.
I had not reached out. I had sent an email. Reaching out describes a physical or emotional gesture—the extension of oneself across a distance that makes the extension notable. It implies effort. It implies that contact was not guaranteed and was therefore meaningful when achieved.
[Read more]A door is open or it is closed. A person is employed or they are not. An application has been approved or it has been rejected. These are the categories institutions prefer, and the preference is not irrational. Binary outcomes are tractable.
[Read more]A system, in its formal definition, is a set of interacting components that function together as a unified whole to achieve a specific purpose. The definition is straightforward. The components are interdependent—if one part fails, the whole is affected.
[Read more]Dr. Fenella Vorpel identifies something precise when she distinguishes between transmission and communication. The message leaves. The message arrives. Something happens in between that is not the message. What arrives is not what departed.
[Read more]Trust, when it works, is a localised thing. You extend it to a specific person, in a specific context, for reasons accumulated through observation and experience.
It is bounded by what you know—about the person, about the situation, about the systems through which the trust operates.
[Read more]Emmy van Deurzen observes that psychological frameworks make judgement easy. They supply definitions—of sanity and its absence, of healthy development and its arrest, of the parent who went wrong and the psyche that bears the consequence. The definitions arrive pre-formed. The practitioner applies them. The person being assessed is seen through them.
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