Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy

by Irvin D. Yalom

“I think about the pointlessness of spending all my life at work and of making more money than I need. I’ve got enough now, but I keep on going. Just like James. I feel sad about the way I’ve lived. I could’ve been a better husband, a better father. Thank God there’s still time.”

The confrontation with the brute facts of life awakened them and catalyzed some major life changes.

Reality is not just something out there but something each of us constructs, or fabricates, to a significant degree.

the structure of our minds actively influences the nature of the reality we experience.

however much we crave to merge with another, there will always remain distance.

The patient was a man who had a blissful honeymoon on some tropical island, one of the great times of his life. But the marriage deteriorated rapidly during the next year, and they divorced. He learned at some point from his wife that, throughout their time together, including their honeymoon, she had been obsessed with another man. His reaction was very similar to yours. He realized that their idyllic relationship on the tropical island was not a shared experience, that he, too, was playing a solo. I don’t recall much more, but I do recall that he, like you, sensed that reality was fractured.”

I’m not truly here. Nothing that happens sinks in. I have insulation around me; I feel it is not me here, not me experiencing these things.

For me one of the darkest things about death is that when I die, my whole world—that is, my world of memories, that rich world peopled by everyone I’ve ever known, that world that seems so rooted in granite—will vanish with me.

“I know a lot of people who have gone back to high school reunions and immediately fell in love, sometimes with an old boyfriend, often with someone they did not know well. Many settled into a late-life marriage, some successful, but some disastrous. I believed many of them loved via association, that is they loved youthful joyousness, their early school days, and their dreamy anticipations of an exciting life, stretching out magically and immeasurably before them. But it wasn’t falling in love with someone in particular. It was making that person a symbol of all that joyousness of their youths.

There’s a Schopenhauer quote that compares love passion with the blinding sun. When it dims in later years, we suddenly become aware of the wondrous starry heavens that had been obscured, or hidden, by the sun. So for me the vanishing of youthful, sometimes tyrannical, passions has made me appreciate the starry skies more and all wonders of being alive, wonders that I had previously overlooked. I’m in my eighties, and I’ll tell you something unbelievable: I’ve never felt better or more at peace with myself. Yes, I know my existence is drawing to a close, but the end has been there since the beginning. What is different now is that I treasure the pleasures of sheer awareness, and I’m fortunate enough to share them with my wife, whom I’ve known almost all of my life.”

“All the symptoms you described yesterday—being removed from life, being insulated, not being in your life—all served to anesthetize yourself from the pain inherent in being a living soul.

It’s just easier to fend off something told to you from the outside than it is something rising from the depths of yourself.

It seems paradoxical, but often we grieve the loss of those with whom we had fulfilled relationships more easily than those with whom so much was unsatisfying, those with whom there was so much unfinished business.

embarrassment is never a solitary event. It always requires at least one other person—in