It’s been an unusual Fall. Last year, when we moved into our apartment in the West End, it was dry and sunny. Vancouver in general doesn’t have the spectacular red leaves of the East Coast: most of the big trees are conifers, and stay green all year. But the West End is an exception, laid out in the nineteenth century as a residential area, each roadway a chain wide, and with laneways at the back of the houses that were originally for stables for horses. The city planners at the time also planted deciduous trees: oaks, maples, hawthorns and cherries. From our balcony, we look right out under the canopy of a Crimean linden, its trailing branches rustling, leaves thinning now but still mostly green and screening us from the windows across the road. This thinning somehow sums up our Fall. Last year the foliage was spectacular, whole trees turning a deep red before the leaves finally fell. This year has been soggy, with rain that only stops only long enough for gardeners to gather up the mulch of leaves that have already fallen. The October rains that you always wait for in the Pacific Northwest have come a month early, and when I cycle to school there was none of that symphony of colour there was last year, only the occasional surprising beauty of a perfect leaf in the sidewalk, or the North Shore lit up by sunlight pouring in through a gap in the clouds. And then suddenly, a few days of clear, cold weather, and the trees seem to catch fire.

I’m six weeks into my course, half way through the semester, and have a similar feeling to that arrival of Fall. I’m digging in, starting to get a little more comfortable with new rhythms of life which will be with me for the next few years. Study is harder than I thought it would be, even though, unlike many of my classmates, I’m not also working. There are issues of memory and focus related to ageing, of course, which I expected. It’s tougher than it used to be to study and focus on what you read, without automatically skipping over it. And there’s also a tension for me within Psychology – its movement, increasingly, towards trying to be a science, towards evidence-based studies which, in order to eliminate variables, end up eliminating most of what is valuable in terms of context. Students who have taken undergraduate classes in Psychology refer quite happily and unself-consciously to a distinction between “individualist” and “collectivist” cultures on the civilizational scale, and I suddenly feel I’m back in the 1980s, with Ezra Vogel’s Japan As Number One, in a strange time warp from which Sociology, Anthropology, and Critical Race Studies are excluded. I know that there are places and movements within Counselling Psychology I can inhabit, but they don’t quite seem to be the spaces of my current classrooms, and I don’t quite have the energy to read further, or perhaps the sense of an overview that comes with undergraduate study in a major. And so I find myself dutifully doing my best to get through the readings assigned, weighing them, planning assignments that expand my knowledge, but do not really push boundaries intellectually in a way that I’d like, but which I am not yet ready for.

My second concern is the amount of theoretical, rather than practical work, in the course as a whole. Only one of my three courses has a rigorous practical component, and yet this is the area of study in which I feel most lacking at the moment. It’s also the most difficult for me, but it’s an area in which I want to learn. How to sit still with a client, without those unconscious gestures and tics that I’m unaware of until the horror of observing myself on video. How to genuinely listen and to empathise. We’ve now completed our first practical assignment in which we transcribe a five-minute section of a video drawn from a simulated counselling session with a partner, and then reflect on it. Three years ago I did an undergraduate course in interviewing skills as a prerequisite for my masters, and at the end of it I thought I was doing quite well. We adopted, as many trainee counsellors do, the methodology of Carl Rogers’ person-centred therapy, in which we listen, empathise, and then show empathy by reflecting back the emotions with which we are presented by the client.

By the end of our summer course three years ago I thought I was doing pretty well. Now, reviewing and painfully transcribing my video, I notice how much I’ve slipped back. I give too much verbal feedback, saying “yeah” repeatedly rather than staying silent or giving a minimal encouragers such as “mmm”: I nod my head vigorously, and give off nervous energy rather than creating calm. When I do reply, I can’t often quite articulate full empathy, and I’m often led off on a tangent by plot, simply following along a story by asking what happened next rather than focusing on the client and affect. This is early days yet, but I also wonder if my experience as an educator, and my age, make this particularly hard for me. I’m used to facilitating, trying to pull disparate ideas together quickly, to get to the intellectual core of the topic under discussion. Now I have to learn a very different skill – how to be led by another, and how to respond not so much to the cognitive but to the affective. Being older, I think, does mean that you become a little more set in your ways: those ruts of behaviour are a little deeper, and a little more difficult to get out of. I’m conscious that I need more practical experience in which I’m given feedback from others and in which I develop capacities for self-reflection, and yet the course as a whole does not provide enough of it, in the first year at least. And at last part of his is me, and my own preference to wander off into theory and criticism, rather than trying to apply knowledge, to express it somehow at the level of the body.

And in all this, there are moments of insight. In my Adult Psychology class we are moving through the life span, and have now just about reached my age. We read Carlo Strenger’s article on sosein, on being just as one is, and active self-acceptance in later life, navigating between the two paths of seeing ageing  as terminal decline on one hand and denying the ageing process completely on the other. After a series of highly scientised articles, too it was refreshing to read something that engages deeply with philosophy, literature, and autobiography. And then to go out of the classroom into the sunlight, and the falling leaves.