Our Days Go By So Quickly

Sonia Nevis sends out occasional letters to the Gestalt community. I received this yesterday and reprint it with her permission. She wrote, "certainly use this letter on your blog. What would be better than to have hope spread around for more and more people."

Our Days Go By So Quickly – What Can We Do About That?

Recently I have realized that I am 86 years old, and there is nothing I can do about it, since each day that passes us is lost forever.

I take short walks, love my work, cherish my clients and have wonderful friends. I have loving children - I hope you can see how lucky I am.

Yet I wake up each day - sad that yet another day has gone.

Up to now I thought there was not much more I could do - but now I feel as though my life has a long carpet to walk on: it lives on.

I have begun to see that all lost days are alive.

The experiences and memories of the life that we have lived and are living, as well as the fiction we have read and the images we have seen in the theater and the films, all contribute to the richness of our being.

Once we understand how much we hold within our hearts, we easily turn them into stories – stories which will live long beyond us.

Realizing this has shifted the way I feel, and how I am looking at my life. I’m amazed at how it comforts me.

But what matters the most is how much I can still do in this difficult world:

• I want to turn my interest to even more people I have never met and talk to them. That might be one of the roads to peace.

• I will keep paying attention to my generosity. There is so much needed that I can be giving.

I hope my long carpet stays very long. I will keep enjoying my life and doing all the things that I love.

I hope you all join me.

Fondly,

Sonia

Sonia March Nevis, PhD, is co-founder of the Gestalt International Study Center and has practiced and taught Gestalt and family therapy concepts worldwide for over thirty-five years. She was a founder of the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland where she created the Center for Intimate Systems, devoted to the training of couples and family therapists. You can read all of Sonia's letters here. 

The Safe Emergency of Therapeutic Situations: Fritz Perls and Gloria (and me)

Recently I wrote about Carl Rogers. While putting together that blog post, I rediscovered the "Gloria" tapes that every psychotherapist-in-training has likely had some exposure. The tapes were therapy demonstrations filmed in 1965. "Gloria," a young recently divorced women, volunteered to meet with Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, and Albert Ellis.

I haven't watched this tapes in years--the last time was perhaps sometime in the late 1990s. They are fun for me to watch. It is also interesting to see a lot of myself--both my history and my current practice--embedded within the words of these three men.

Let's start off with Fritz Perls. Along with his wife Lara, he founded the school of Gestalt psychotherapy. It's not a theory I think a lot about anymore--that's probably because the theory itself sits deep in my bones and works behind everything I have learned. In the early 90s I started hanging out at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, took several workshops, worked individually with a gestalt therapist for several years, and later participated in a gestalt therapy group for several additional years.

I'm indebted to this early teachers--Jody Telfair, Barbara Fields, Karen Fleming, Mary Ward, and Jackie Lowe Stevenson. There have been many teachers since then but none so central as these.

On to the show. Here is part one of the the full Gloria tape with Fritz Perls.

A friendly sort, eh? Before judgement sets it, put Perls in his time. This was 1965. It was a time of great social change and liberatory movements. Confrontation was in, as was, apparently, smoking.