[Context: read the previous part or start at the beginning. TW: bad amateur fiction!]
Gerald never minded visiting his therapist, but he looked forward to some sessions more than others, depending on whether he had any interesting observations to report or interesting questions to ask.
Today’s session was one he was excited about.
He entered Morris’s incredibly tiny theater, saw Morris sitting in the front row, and greeted him with a wave but walked right past him onto the tiny stage.
“I have a new Theory of Everything,” Gerald announced, loudly and melodramatically.
“Really?!” said Morris. “Are you ready to share it, as your position on stage might suggest?”
“Yes, I am,” Gerald replied. Then, abandoning the melodramatic tone: “as you’ll see, it’s not a theory of EVERYTHING everything; for example, it does not fully address my fear of dying, which remains strong. But it pulls together a few strands of my life in a way that has seemed useful lately.”
“OK!” said Morris with enthusiasm. “Please…go ahead and lay it on me!”
“All right,” said Gerald. He hadn’t practiced explaining the whole thing out loud, so he wondered where to start.
“So,” he began, “one of the main existential problems that has been haunting me, as you know, is the worry that the things I do with my life — even the things that seem important right now — are all pretty meaningless, since they all will be washed away by the tides of time.” He paused to savor the phrase “washed away by the tides of time,” which he might have just made up.
“Recently I seem to be developing a two-part rebuttal to this,” he continued.
“The first part is that I tend to under-value positive impacts that are short-term but nonetheless real. If I do something to help a student get through their day, even if it has no impact on their learning or their choice of major or their choice of career or any of that, that’s still a good thing in and of itself. So I think part of my challenge is to remember to value those little things.” He thought again of Cissy’s Toto hypothesis.
From the front row, Morris nodded attentively.
Getald waited a beat to see whether Morris was about to say something. He was not.
“And then the second part,” he resumed, “is to acknowledge that the effects of our actions are often random, or at least unpredictable, but that if we’re always doing our best…” He tried to finish the thought: “…good things will often result.”
“The aspect of this that I’m currently finding most inspiring,” he added quickly, “is not the idea that good work will get rewarded on average, but the idea that good work will sometimes have cool consequences not knowable in advance. The implication being that you should constantly be on the lookout for opportunities to make a difference, because the next opportunity could lead somewhere excellent.”
Gerald frowned. “I’m having trouble saying this precisely or eloquently,” he said, “but that openmindedness to possibilities seems somewhat unlike me, but very healthy. Like, even if the next week looks like it’s going to be filled with pointless drudgery, I should stay vigilant and keep seeking ways to turn bits of the drudgery into good things.” He sighed. “Is this making any sense?”
Morris looked serious.
“I like your theory,” he said. “I really like it, and I think I believe it.” He raised an eyebrow. “But whether I believe it is not necessarily important; what’s important is whether this theory proves useful and durable for you.”
“So,” Morris continued, “Let’s give this theory a stress test, shall we? Here’s my challenge to you: over the next week, try applying this theory to, say, three different challenging situations in, or aspects of, your life. See whether this theory leads you to productive thoughts and behaviors that might not have occurred without the theory. Then report back to me how it went. Does that plan sound reasonable?”
“Sure,” said Gerald. “You want me to take my hot new hypothesis for a test drive.”
“Yeah,” said Morris, “that’s one way of putting it. Just make sure the testing is as robust as possible. Take a situation that makes you really uncomfortable or depressed, and see whether you can get through it better than before. Do you think you can do that?”
“I think so,” said Gerald as he nodded.
“Do any such situations come to mind right now?”
Gerald nodded again. “They do,” he said.
[to be continued]
My Track Record 
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