On the Telephone
Accompanying someone is the art of looking in a way that allows a person to begin to see themselves again.
These thoughts come from shifts on the telephone. What was said in the conversations remains there; all that is told here is what such hours do to a person.
Without Goodbye
After a call.
Early morning on the telephone. A tired voice: a crisis, the man says, he cannot go on. For a long time now, a sound in his ear that does not stop – not at night, not by day. Three hours of sleep. The days spent in bed. He says both words himself, tinnitus and depression, soberly, the way one names things one has known for a long time. And then, very clearly: an explanation is not what he needs. He needs a solution.
A solution I did not have. What I had was an offer: to remain with the sound for a little moment, together, instead of running from it – to sense what it stirs in him. Nothing changes there, he said. It was disturbing. And embarrassing. I have kept that word: embarrassing – as though he had to be ashamed of a sound he never chose. Then he said once more how little he had slept.
And then the line was dead. No goodbye, no note of displeasure, nothing. My next sentence was already on its way and never arrived.
I remained seated for a while. Why? Did he hang up – disappointed, annoyed, too exhausted for one more sentence? Did the receiver slip from his hand? Did the technology cut the call? Did he fall asleep, in the middle of the morning, after who knows how many nights of three hours? I went through the conversation again, looking for the place where I might have lost him. Perhaps it exists. Perhaps it does not. I will never know.
At some point the symmetry struck me. He wanted a solution and no explanation – and I had no solution. Now I want an explanation and no solution – and he cannot give me one. For a moment we were more alike than the short conversation would suggest: two people needing something that is not to be had just now.
On the telephone, the endings do not belong to you. People arrive unannounced, and some leave the same way. You do not learn how their story goes on, not even how the conversation ended – whether it had an ending at all, or only a rupture. This too is something you learn in this service, more slowly than anything else: to live with open endings that receive no interpretation.
To my why there is no answer. There is only one thing, and it is not an explanation but a fact: if he dials again, tonight or some day, someone will answer.
Handrail
During long conversations.
There are telephone conversations that move in circles. The other day, one: a man, in the morning. He asks whether I have a few minutes.
The minutes become three quarters of an hour. What it is about belongs to him. What has been said comes again, with full force, as though it had never been said.
He keeps asking whether I understand how he means it. I say yes, and I mean it. It does not become much more than that; from me, it remains a handful of sentences longer than a yes.
Once I ask what is hardest for him just now. He begins. Then the circle closes again. And once, in the middle of the circling, he says quietly that he does not really want to quarrel. Then it goes on.
In conversations like these, I often do not know what I am actually doing. I listen, I say something, and the circling goes on. And at some point a second question arises, quieter than the first and less welcome: When am I allowed to stop? How do you end a conversation that cannot end? And what if I get it wrong?
I notice then that I am reaching for something. For a rule, a procedure, a sentence that says: now. For a handrail. Handrails are a good thing. They stand firm, they are the same for everyone, and they decide nothing. But in the middle of the conversation there is none.
There is something that is not a handrail. You look for a handhold outside; you grip it with your hand. Bearing is what remains when there is nothing outside to grip. It says nothing about stopping. It only lets me ask without falling.
At some point this conversation, too, ends. Whether at the right time, I do not know. Next week I pick up again.
'It holds – before anything is solved.' – from: Staying With.
Two Chairs
After an experiment.
A woman calls, in the morning. She has understood a great deal about herself in the last few days, she says. But understanding alone does not make it lighter.
I ask whether she is at home. Then I ask whether she has two chairs. She sets them out. One stands for today. The other for back then. I tell no more than that; it is her story.
She lays the telephone on the table and puts it on speaker. From then on, I am only a word in the room.
It is a short word. Now. Each time I say it, she walks from one chair to the other. Back and forth, five or six times. In between I ask what is different.
What she finds at the two chairs, I do not tell either. Towards the end of the call, she draws one deep, audible breath. She wants to find herself two spots outside, on her walks, and go on practising. Some things cannot be talked through. But they can be walked.
Perhaps she is walking now.
The exercise follows the Systemic Structural Constellations of Insa Sparrer (SySt® Institute, Munich).