If you find a way of thinking about something it can be rather like finding the right sized envelope for a letter. Your thoughts become a message to someone or something who might understand you. Before that your thoughts might have an alarming tendency to race around in your head causing chaos, anxiety.

Finding that way of thinking means finding that addressee. I suppose when I think about things I might be writing to Bion, Bowen, Freud, Kafka, Reeves, or Van Gogh. Or I might say Athens, Bauhaus, Library, Paris. Places, institutions, these count just as much, if they can be found. If there’s a thought that I might, in my thoughts, be understood then there’s someone to read my letter.

Once there’s a way of thinking about something it feels as if life can go on. Traumatic memories are ones frozen out of thought. The future becomes unthinkable, and perhaps a fantasy or a vast frightening space, when the past is unreadable.

Life goes on.