We’ve reached the beginning of May. The weather’s warmer, and leaves have arrived on the trees: on the cherry trees first, green and brown ovals nestling in among pink blossoms just ready to fall, then on the horse chestnuts, tiny little tents of green that grow bigger, and unclench, like opening hands. The linden tree outside our balcony is always slower to turn green: as I write the leaves are unfolding, but are not much bigger than the size of a dollar coin. We look through them to the balcony opposite, and the smokers who come out each hour for a cigarette, as if through a bead curtain. And the catalpas at the end of the street, always the last to come into leaf, are still resolutely bare. 

This last month has been the first substantial pause in my study since I started my program in September 2019. I thought I’d be going back to Singapore, and so planned for a summer away, with no coursework, and my practicum starting in September. And then, growing restrictions on non-essential travel and the third wave of COVID-19 infections in Canada made us change plans. We cancelled our travel to Singapore, and thought of a week in Tofino, on Vancouver Island. As travel advisories proliferated, we abandoned this plan, and booked a holiday in Whistler, the ski resort an hour and half’s drive up Howe Sound and into the mountains. Whistler then promptly became a virus variant hotspot: the resort was closed early, and we cancelled again. The most we have to look forward to in the immediate future is trips to the North Shore: hiking at Lynn Valley, or walking at Lighthouse Park. It’s strange to be here in this beautiful but shrunken world, to no longer have that rhythm of study and to find, as so many older friends have told me, how easily the tasks of everyday living expand to fill precious spare time.  

I have returned to reading, eclectically at first, but then with growing focus. I picked up Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments on our local library shelf, a book I’d thought of reading when it was published in late 2019, but never had the time to follow through with. It’s an easy read, and Atwood’s still got that narrative ability to always keep a reader engaged. The beginning is gentle enough, and it’s easy early on to begin to stitch together the different fragments of individual stories. There’s something amusing here about Canada’s relationship to the USA, here transformed into the theocracy of Gilead, but as we enter documents from Gilead’s past the narrative quickly becomes darker, reaching almost the intensity of The Handmaid’s Tale. Towards its end, the novel turns into a plot-driven escape narrative that somehow seems emotionally shallower, even as it still keeps a reader’s interest, and then the metafictional framing at the end seems a little tired – the danger of telling it through the perspective of a pedantic scholar. The novel’s readable, but for me not wholly satisfying. 

The second novel I read was Jo Owens’s A Funny Kind of Paradise. The book’s about a woman who has suffered a stroke living in care, and it’s the first novel by an author who has worked as a care aide for twenty years. The novel has a double time line, following Francesca through her efforts to live on while unable to communicate verbally, and also looping back to her experience as a single mother raising two children with the help of a close friend, who has recently passed away. It’s an interesting novel from an unusual perspective, and it’s strong, as a reader might expect, in recreating the community of the long-term care home, and the interactions of staff and residents. The novel also made me realise how it’s often difficult to write about such institutional contexts. The life of the protagonist, Francesca, doesn’t really have an arc in the present, since she has little autonomy, and every day is much like the next: changes of staff or residents in her shared room happen at random, rather than with an unfolding design. The back story of her relationship with her friend Anna and her two children helps give the narrative structure, but doesn’t, for me, succeed completely in doing so. Yet there is something that I’ll take away from this book: the physical space of the care home, and the everyday care of the body, from the perspective of both resident and staff. Fran’s son, Chris, visits her, and inevitably I think of my own visits to my father in care, four years ago, flying halfway across the world, and, try as I might, never quite being fully able to enter, with him, this new world in which he found himself in the last nine months of his life. 

In the last few days I’ve begun to return to and explore some of the material that I’ve learned over the last two years, to follow up leads. One of the figures who every student learning counselling or psychotherapy encounters very early on is Carl Rogers, the American founder of person-centred therapy. Rogers re-envisioned the relationship between therapist and patient to a relationship between therapist and client: rather than an expert who made interpretations and instructed a patient how to live their life, the therapist was a facilitator who, through non-directional empathic listening, enabled self-realization on the part of the client: Rogers often writes of the therapist being a “midwife” to the fully realised self. In programs such as UBC’s I’ve encountered Rogers many times from my undergraduate prerequisites onwards. What’s interesting is that while person-centred therapy is introduced as its own school with its unique theoretical assumptions, Rogers is most commonly held up to us as a model in terms of learning basic skills that form the foundation for all counselling practice. Generations of students—myself included—have seen videos of Rogers at work, most notably his famous session with Gloria. And we also read Rogers in the original, his 1957 article “The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change,” in which “the person we shall term the therapist” is asked to achieve congruence or genuineness in a relationship with the client, to have “unconditional positive regard” for them in which the client is never judged, and show deep empathy, “to sense the client’s private world as if it were your own, but without ever losing the ‘as if’ quality.” 

Following Rogers for me was a very useful exercise in unlearning habits of listening that we use in everyday life. We are often inattentive to the person we are in dialogue with: we do not listen, but are already formulating our response. We may want to argue with someone, to express our own views. Or we may want to comfort the person in front of us, but in the process miss what they are saying: we may give unsolicited advice, or try to cheer someone up in a way that minimizes their suffering. Rogers works in practice. Time and time again, as a counsellor-in-training, I’ve been struck by how powerful it can be for the person in front of me to be deeply listened to, to be heard by another perhaps for the first time, and to have what they say reflected back to them through empathic repetition, summary, paraphrase, or an interpretation that is confirmed by the person in front of me. And yet, critically, I wonder about whether Rogers’ practice embodies skills that are universal, or whether his method is marked by the time at which he developed his practice: “client,” “empathy,” and indeed the notion of self-realization are ideologically fraught terms. With this in mind, I’ve enjoyed reading David Cohen’s Carl Rogers: A Critical Biography, one of the few accounts of his life and work I’ve discovered that isn’t hagiographic. I’m still trying to piece together and reflect on what came out of this: Rogers’s Christian upbringing, and how notions of unconditional positive regard may, despite his commitment to science, have spiritual roots, and how person-centred therapies normalize certain ways of seeing the self. A new, comprehensive biography of Rogers would be a wonderful undertaking, but for me it perhaps would be a bridge too far. 

And, after all my reading, I’m still working on scholarship, on a commissioned chapter about World Literature, the City, and Singapore. I have a strange feeling of finality about it. When it is written, for the first time since I published my first peer-reviewed paper in 1992, there will be nothing in the pipeline. I have one or two embryonic research projects, but these will take at least a couple of years to bring to fruition.  In conversation, a friend of mine –in a very Rogerian manner—reflected back my feelings to me: he said I was in mourning. As I go about research, note-taking, and then the process of writing, there is a sense of a ritual. I’m doing it more slowly than I used to, more aware of myself and the process of my thoughts. Mourning, as I may have written before, isn’t simply about severing ties with the dead: it’s about elaborating a new relationship with what has died. And I’m doing this at a time of gathering rebirth: blossoms swelling and then falling, leaves on the trees, and, in the last few days, bundles of goslings and ducklings in the park.