I'm Still Here

The Installation of Hope   When my beloved Susan was alive and still working with the clients in her psychotherapy practice, she used to talk about her job as being about ‘the installation of hope’. I was always taken with the wisdom of that expression. It was what she did. Her clients were largely people afflicted with varying degrees of traumatic brain injury, whose lives had been disrupted and, in some cases, nearly destroyed. She helped them give voice to their frustrations, she helped them cope, and most importantly, helped them to believe that their lives could improve. It was miraculous to bear witness to this process. As human beings we are wired to hope. If we were not, given the vicissitudes of life, most of us would probably jump off a cliff at the first opportunity, and yet we do not. We persist. We hope. We hope our lives will improve. We hope that our children's’ lives will be better than ours. I would submit that one of the main responsibilities of our leadersh