Walter Mosley Read Online Free PDF Page B

might fit better in a bad marriage, under a tyrannical boss, in a world where their own government declares war on the poor and weak and innocent. They ask, How can I live with this pain and this guilt? But the real question that should be asked is How can I live?

    There are some therapists out there who try to attain a level of objectivity . Just the attempt to achieve impartiality is what we need more than anything to make decisions in a world where we are ripped off, bamboozled, and then blamed for our own condition.
    PATIENT: Am I wrong to be angry that I work sixty hours a week and still can’t afford to send both of my children to the colleges they want to go to?
    THERAPIST: What do you think?
    I know this appears to be a simple counterinterrogative but it is really a revolutionary exchange. The therapist is not making a moral judgment on the patient, she is not trying to say that he should grin and bear it. If the questioner (patient) says that he feels guilty or that he is angry, or has any other response, the dialogue will go from there. The purpose is to examine the problem in relation to how you feel, to decipher the conundrum that flummoxes you. You do not arrive at a you-should kind of answer but at you-are or you-want . This is as close to objectivity as we’re ever going to get. No one is ever truly objective but that really isn’t necessary—all you have to do is try to allow the emotions to arise from the person experiencing
them. In this atmosphere the patient has the potential to find out what he really feels and what he really wants. Between feeling and want is the closest we’ll ever come to understanding who we are and where we might go.
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    The road to revolution cannot be traveled alone. The movement will have its leaders and followers, its theorists and soldiers, its full adherents and its less committed—but all of these will have to work together in order to bring us out of the malaise and into something like a concrete idea. And objectivity is the unreachable standard that we must strive for. In an off-quote from the poet: What is is, is the only way I can conceive of change.
    The gesture toward objectivity ( is ), therapy ( is ), and unity ( is ) comes together in a way that is unique in our political history. In that trinity we might find some answers that go beyond patriotism toward a kind of necessary humanism.
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    One final note on the primary assumption of this step:
    I refer to the person who goes to the therapist as a patient . There is serious intention behind this word. We, most of us in modern-day America, are sick. We suffer deep emotional displacement from the lies
we are told and the subsequent lies we tell ourselves. I’m fine, doing well. I’m safe. I’m part of a healthy, democratic polity. I am helping my children to become whole, healthy individuals.
    None, or at least little of this, is true. Tens of thousands of our children die in foreign wars and prisons, from drug addiction and substance abuse. The great majority of our poor are children and their mothers. The elderly are systematically stripped of their wealth and dignity. Life itself is defined by alienated labor for the vast majority of our people, and truth is a rarer commodity than moon rocks.
    Make no mistake—we are a society of ailing denizens. We need treatment for our infected souls.

STEP SIX
    EVERYDAY
    T he most important lesson I’ve learned as a writer is that practice of the art is something I must exercise every day. The reason for this constant training is that any idea worth discovering is bigger than my head. The twists and turns, story and plot, characters and character development of a novel cannot be held in a single thought or even in a train of thought. This novel takes up a lot of space and needs room to breathe and evolve.
    Another way to look at the novel, rather than by its girth, is its depth. Most of the ideas of a novel exist beneath the waves