What I like about this image is the poetry contained in the idea of the reversal; what should swallow us (the well) is in fact placed overhang, causing in our minds this improbable meeting between the bottom and the sky. A well of light, it is this day which bursts into the middle of the hard materials, this piece of irregularity which springs up like good news. Of course, it is difficult to maintain. He often seems like a fantasy, like a “useless” that we could do without. It will probably sink, swallow up budgets that could have been used for the most pragmatic.
And yet, when life nails us to bed, to the floor or to the bottom of a well, it is these fantasies which, precisely, sustain us. Leonard Cohen, with his image of this “fault that lets in the light”, had well grasped the need for these breaks in our lives.
At the beginning of November, I participated in a professional development day on the mental health of caregivers, alongside the relevant Charles-Antoine Barbeau-Meunier, sociologist and resident doctor in psychiatry, Jacques Quintin, philosopher and full professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Care de la santé de la Université de Sherbrooke and Déborah Ummel, psychologist and professor at the Faculty of Psychoeducation at the Université de Sherbrooke.
With the participants, we discussed how the current structures of care could generate various ethical sufferings in those who wished to escape the logic of dominant productivity. This culture, which favors what the philosopher Ivan Illich called “paradoxical counterproductivity”, leads to the establishment of standards increasingly distant from an efficient form of communication that generates meaning. This sometimes results in the application of protocols that are likely to become absurd in the face of deeply complex, unique situations that are resistant to standardization. It is in these situations that the system comes to “counter-produce” what it is intended for – to “take care” -, by creating suffering instead.
The “skylights”, then, are based on the humanistic dispositions of individuals who will dare to create breaches in the smooth materials of administrative protocols, while assuming the risks alone. We are in Ken Loach or in the Dardenne brothers: what appears to us as what should be the base on which the foundations of the health care system would take root is unfortunately often reduced to “what escapes it” or “what is there. resist ”.
Fortunately, there are still some, intramural and extramural, of these skylights. You have also filled my mailbox with them.
To close this November series, I am reverberating this list all inspired by your stories, which could serve as light therapy, in order to hold together until the solstice.
Nature that saves
There is Sophie’s boreal forest, the one that endured Sylvie’s grief, the other that brought Marc back to life, the lake that allowed Isabelle to raise her two sick children, one stroke at a time, Caroline’s Mount Royal, Sébastien’s river, which he finds sitting on this low wall in the rue des Remparts, the mountain where Esther placed all her fears of a recurrence, the river that flows through the life of Jean and Pierrette , the one where Valérie was able to digest the word “depression”, the islands which embraced Mireille with their squalls. “What if the meaning boiled down to a salutary contemplation of nature? And if the courage to accept one’s destiny was precisely that: the ability to surrender to the work of time, without seeking to change anything, ”writes Nathalie.
Your “room for yourself”
To find the way back to your interiorities, there are your workshops (sewing for Louise or writing for Louis), the sailboat that survives everything from Michel, the library of the cégep de L’Assomption for Frans, which s ‘add to all your makeshift camps (which we pronounce “camp” and where it is allowed to drink and smoke, even when you have not smoked for years).
Your churches
The abbey of Saint-Benoît-du-Lac named by so many of you, that of Rougemont by Marie-Christine, the church of the Precious-Blood of Saint-Hyacinthe for Alain, the basilica of Notre-Dame de Micheline or even the new Val Notre-Dame abbey by Michel and Jacqueline.
Your improbable
The cemeteries appease Alain, Colette and Jean-François. The contemplation of the idea of death facilitates a certain access to this impermanence of the beauty of the world.
Your stories
On the side of the stories that shine at the bottom of the well, there is this, from the Grouping of alternative resources in mental health.
Your faces
Then, this little pearl of sweetness, in congruence with the thought of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the Facebook page of Stéphane Boily who photographs homeless people in exchange for ten dollars.