The desire to foster ‘wellness’ and confront the root cause of suffering is now endemic to society, what’s more it’s been destigmatized and popularized through skillful marketing. There is a rational explanation for the pain you feel and an immediate means of transcending it or excising it - just click here. The question of a moral authority or self-care regimen is built into today’s industry. At worst it enables greed and performativity, at best it enables mercy, compassion and tenderness. Such a pervasive industry of psychological coherence wasn’t always the case.
Fifty-five years ago the ‘Self-Help’ aisle was more a shelf shared with ‘New Age’ and ‘Traditional Medicine.’ Hugh Prather’s Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person (1970) graced these ‘aisles.’ Critics weren’t sure where to place him.
“Notes to myself was essentially a stack of yellow sheets (which I called my diary) where I went to sort things out, where I put down my pains and problems, and my very deep longing to break through to some truth. In many passages I was guessing, but because I was trying hard to be honest with myself, I sometimes guessed right. In going over each passage, I can remember almost every thought I had when I wrote it – I can remember whether I was being dishonest while telling myself I wasn’t,” Prather wrote. “I hope this little book also echoes the truth of your own path. Please know I walk with you,” he closes out the foreword.
Notes to Myself is not overly didactic or laden with jargon for overcoming endless judgment or shame. “The injunction to be unselfish is an impossible ideal." Prather’s wisdom is broken up into blocked off proverbs, paragraphs that resemble aphorisms, and is usually penned through the lens of relational dynamic with family.
One fights the inclination to speculate on how Prather, who passed away in 2010, might have evaluated today’s wellness culture, but it feels safe to assume he would see the cultivation of grace or an accessible language for cultivating grace as an improvement to a precarious world teetering on cruel indifference.
-Katie Calderon