And So . . .: Thoughts and Stories of a Life - Paperback

by John Strauss (Author)

Another old guy who thinks he has something interesting to say?

Well, maybe. I have had an interesting life though, a mix of stuff leading to becoming a psychiatrist and a professor at Yale. But other things too, part of a life more generally. Being a worker for the gas company on a team digging up decaying pipelines where the gas tainted earth has a horrible smell. And even more about life generally, hitchhiking for over 10,000 miles around the central and west of the US and around Western Europe, often an incredible experience where you get in the front seat of a car with someone you've never met and you both start to talk about what you're doing here, what your life is like, and what you're looking for. The amazing experience of learning to be a doctor and encountering all those people who are dealing with being what we call "patients." A year spent studying with the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget in Geneva Switzerland, many many months in that incredible city Paris, among other things, learning to speak, write, and publish in that language, French, which can be so beautiful that even when the woman on the bus wants to get off and says La porte, still vous plait ("the door please") it can sound like the beginning of an aria from La Boheme.

But all these are not just experiences, they are ways of being in contact with an incredible diversity of people and a huge diversity of ways of being. And now the experience of getting older and in my 90's more feeble and seeing the world in a still different way, from a different perspective.