The School of Life

I know nothing of The School of Life other than the back jacket wrapping notes on a delightful book published by them that I picked up a few years ago, but put aside to read on a humid day. It states: “The School of Life is dedicated to developing emotional intelligence – believing that our most persistent problems are created by a lack of understating, compassion and communication. We operate from ten physical campuses around he world, including London, Amsterdam, Seoul and Melbourne. We produce films, run classes, offer therapy and make a range of psychological products. The School of Life Press (no relation) publishes books on the most important issues of emotional life. Our titles are designed to entertain, educate, console and transform”.

Rather ambitious, until you open Small Pleasures and realize how well the book lives up to its billing. Consider the piece, Driving on the Motorway at Night, which is identified as driving therapy: “For thinking, surprisingly, complete stillness is not always the best environment for coaxing the mind towards its best efforts. Often a more helpful set-up is quiet plus motion plus something else not too taxing to be done. Driving provides multiple minor routines: checking the rear mirror, micro adjustments on the accelerator, the automatic scanning of the speedometer and the constant interplay of the hands on the wheel and the road ahead … New ways of seeing things come into view. And they do precisely because we’re not trying too hard .”

Or this, from Sunday Mornings: “The other side of the traditional Sabbath was a contrastive set of expectations around the things you positively engaged with in this specially designed period of 24 hours – motivated by the thought that a day is long, but not infinite … Ceremonies were evolved to turn people’s minds to questions that matter but typically get marginalized: what am I doing with my life; how are my relationships going; what do I really value and why? … States of higher consciousness are, of course, desperately short-lived. We shouldn’t in any case aspire to make them permanent, because they don’t sit so well with the many important practical tasks we all need to attend to. But we should make the most of them when they arise, and harvest their insights for the time we require them the most.”

Consider A Favourite Old Jumper: “With the jumper we rehearse something key. It is a transitional object that helps us along the path not from childhood to adulthood but towards old age. The jumper words in opposition to a tendency – otherwise quite evident in lives – to fall out of love with things as they lose their original merits. It reverses the cold trajectory of growing disappointment: instead, love quietly accumulates round it. Without quite stating it plaint to ourselves, we hope that we too will be appreciated as this jumper is; that someone will feel about you this way and not only forgive us for our frayed, misshapen bodies and characters – but will come to love us precisely for these things.

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What about Daisies? “We don’t give each other bunches of daisies to mark special occasions. We don’t go for special trips to look at famous daisy gardens. Couples don’t purchase a single daisy as a token of their love. This isn’t really evidence of any failure on the part of this particular flower. Rather, it’s an oversight on our part. We disdain the daisy for an unfortunate reason: it is abundant. It’s a victim of the unfortunate idea that to be special something has to be rare.”