Helen Hudson

Life is messy. I don’t care how many times you clean the kitchen or how well. It just gets messy. Maybe it’s bread crumbs or a smear of jelly. Maybe it’s grease and pasta splattered across the stove. Maybe you made a smoothie and forgot to put the top on tight. But face it: mess happens. It happens in our kitchens and it happens in our lives.

Ever wonder what the profile of the person ‘least likely’ to seek out counseling is? Look at your client list. You will find that it is noticeably lacking in this population: the older, white male. Now get this: 73% of suicides are committed by, yeah, “older, white males.” Do they need us? You bet. Will they come to us? Probably not, even though their suicide rate is higher than older, black males and women put together.

In the 80’s, there was much ado about the baby boomers latest trend: cocooning. It was heralded that theirs would soon be a generation of stay-at homes, who wore sweat clothes and flip-flops instead of tuxedos and stilettos. No longer would they be out on the town, but instead at home watching movies on their VCR’s. And that is exactly what happened, but not just because the VCR had been invented, but frankly, because they were getting tired.

You don’t have to read War And Peace to know that Tolstoy sure had a handle on people. “Everybody thinks of changing humanity, but nobody thinks of changing himself,” he said. In fact, I’ll bet he’d have made one heck of a counselor. He certainly had the patience. Scholars say that he endured a 48 year marriage known as, ‘one of the unhappiest in literary history.’ Interestingly, he would die of pneumonia at a train station the very night he was finally making his escape, both from the marriage and his aristocratic lifestyle.

Interesting ride in the elevator this morning. As the doors closed, I went to push the UP button, but the four year-old next to me beat me to it, hitting the DOWN one instead. We headed down. “DADDY!” she shrieked, “Why aren’t we going UP???” “Because you pushed the DOWN button,” he said with a grimace of embarrassment.