Maintaining a tight ship of life

valorising social networks like family, school, church or nation can validate the relationships out of which injustice can grow by taking them as 'the given' of life. Even the most ardent practitioners of checklists and Daily Questions - high-profile believers in the concept - are not immune to this kind of pain. When the Boston surgeon and author Atul Gawande published his article The Checklist Manifesto in 2011, we spoke on the phone about my Daily Questions. He was intrigued by the notion and said he would adapt questions to his daily routine. A few months later when I checked in with him, he described how the questions changed his life. Although he was healthy and in his forties, he had a wife and two sons who depended on him. It bothered him that he didn't have life insurance to protect his family. So he added the following to his daily list of questions: Are you updated on your life insurance? It wasn't much of a behavioral goal, more like a specific chore that he could do once and erase from his list. And yet. For fourteen consecutive days, he answered the life insurance question with a no. But what about the hidden spectres already inside the room? The ghosts inside one's own psyche? Here, however, is some good news. As we mature, there is inevitably a slow awakening to the fact of this hidden self. It's inevitable. The world itself unmasks us. We have glimpses of those parts of the self that we have been keeping under wraps. We are, in fact, as Freud so beautifully pointed out--really, finally, dramatically--incapable of containing these hidden and split-off parts. We are incapable of keeping a secret.

If our lips do not speak it, Freud said, it screams out through our actions. But she kept returning to the otherworldly moment, like a secret source of security. During the hushed, long days when her son slept, she wandered around the house, unable to focus, replaying the memory of Michael and his smile. At first it felt like a harmless vacation in my mind. I'd think about Michael, and it felt comforting and exciting at the same time. Taking care of Ethan in the house all day, I almost felt like I was recuperating too. But then, when Ethan got better and went back to school, I kept feeling this way. A few weeks ago, I ran into Michael at the supermarket, and I started shaking. The day was pretty much shot. I felt like I was going crazy. Christina wept. One feminist response to the inadequacy of alternatives like communitarianism has been to emphasise the necessity of choice in relationships. And this is where friendship as a model of social connection comes in because it is a relationship that is, in large part, characterised by voluntarism. Marilyn Friedman has written suggestively about this. Friendship, she argues, is a good way of thinking about what it is to be connected, particularly in the urban context in which many forms of connection are based on choice not obligation. Her point is not that friendship encourages people to have a friendly attitude towards each other which in turn reduces incidents of abuse: that would clearly be highly unlikely, to say nothing of the fact that cities can also be places of isolation, loneliness and alienation. Neither does she treat friendship idealistically, as if she were describing a society of friends in which division, dissent and disruption had ceased: we have seen that friendship can aspire to be noble but has little to do with utopias. Rather, she focuses on friendship to outline a way of engaging with society. For women, she argues, friendship is the context within which the political imperatives of mutuality, equality and reciprocity are best experienced. This is empowering at the personal level and becomes political because, as relationalexperts in the field', it gives women things to teach the world around them.

In terms of the argument against individualism, what women's friendships teach is what she callsright relationship' - exemplified in a balance of four elements: love, feeling more united than separated; As Dr Gawande stared at the dispiriting string of nos, the irony wasn't lost on him that he saved strangers' lives every day yet he couldn't master the simple task of purchasing life insurance to protect the people he loved most. He was failing a test that he'd written. But irony doesn't trigger action. The accumulated nos triggered an intense emotion, Gawande told me. He was embarrassed that he had failed to complete such a simple task that delivered a cherished benefit. The next day he bought life insurance. That's the secret power of daily self-questioning. If we fall short on our goals eventually we either abandon the questions or push ourselves into action. We feel ashamed or embarrassed because we wrote the questions, knew the answers, and still failed the test. When the questions begin with Did I do my best to. Nietzsche famously observed the same psychological phenomenon, saying that those aspects of our self which we exile to the basement of consciousness, will come to us as fate--as the alien intruder. These hidden parts both startle and intrigue us. Our hidden parts sneak up on us. They reveal themselves in unaccountable behaviors. For Freud, of course, these hidden parts were usually organized around sex and aggression. We exile our sexual desires from our awareness, and we inexorably end up acting them out. We have, for example, the preacher who is caught with his pants down in a motel room with a prostitute. He is aghast, and astounded at his own behavior. He faces the cameras, stunned.

How did I get here? Struck by her tears, I asked if she was aware of feeling depressed, something she'd struggled with earlier in life. I cry a lot, but I don't feel depressed, she said. I feel anxious when I see Michael, but I don't walk around anxious all day. My problem is I feel too much. Sometimes I feel like my body is being turned inside out by all this intensity, like I want to crawl out of my skin. And then I start feeling that I'll die unless I can do something. I'm obviously here because I needed to tell someone. We agreed to meet again later that week. In the days after our meeting, I let her feelings, her rawness, work on me and tried to notice what arose in my mind without my trying to impose order. Why now? power, the power to fight for the right to choose what is best; embodiment, the struggle to love ourselves and each other particularly in relation to our bodies; and fourth what she calls spirituality, the sense of being concerned for quality of life. When friendships manifest such right relationships they become both liberative and witnesses to it. Hunt realises that friendship has its weaknesses stemming from the ambiguities inherent in it. These may well stymie the attempt to find the right balance she seeks; such are its contingencies and vulnerabilities. However, she concludes that when friendship is regarded as the ethical norm, it reflects values that are different from those associated with social atomism. Rational economic man is exposed.

This carries with it the potential for much social good. the feeling is even worse. We have to admit that we didn't even try to do what we know we should have done. For Emily R. the trigger was the one-day employee discount at Whole Foods. Forty percent off everything in the store - even the fresh vegetables. Emily had just graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and landed her first job at the supermarket chain's Charlestown branch, a few miles north of downtown Boston. Emily was twenty-six years old. For most of her life, she'd had a weight problem. She ate poorly and mindlessly, and the problem only got worse when she committed to a career in the culinary arts. She was always cooking, testing recipes, thinking about food. I felt like there was an animal inside that I could not understand and I could not control, he says in an interview. But his confrontation had also revealed another truth. We can see the truth in others far more clearly than we can see it in ourselves. We--you and I--can readily see that the preacher's behavior makes no sense whatsoever, can't we? And, what's more, we can see that it makes no sense well before he ends up in the motel with the prostitute. Why is he doing this, we wonder? Why in God's name is he undermining his entire career? As it turns out, contemporary neuroscience has made headway in understanding the roots of incoherence in autobiographical narratives, and fractures in consciousness itself. We now know that coherence and integration, or lack thereof, have much to do with how we remember our lives, our experiences.