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All Chapters of Staying with him: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

180 Chapters

CHAPTER 171- The Practice, Year Ten

In November the practice turned ten.She had not planned to mark it. She had not planned to mark it in the way she did notplan most of the significant markers of the professional work, the years turning overwithout ceremony because the work itself was the ceremony, the daily-ness of thesessions and the accumulation of the clients and the specific ongoing quality ofattending to the interior lives of other people with the full attention, all of it being themarking in the same way that a life was the marking of itself.Aisha had brought tea.She had come into the consulting room on the specific morning in November and shehad brought two cups of tea, the good cups, the ones they kept for the occasions whenthe occasion required a slightly better cup than the ordinary, and she had said: ten yearstoday, approximately.Approximately, Olivia had agreed.They had drunk the tea.She had thought about the ten years.She thought about what the ten years contained. Not the statistics of it,

CHAPTER 172- Diana’s Garden

Diana came in March.She had been to the new house before — she had come when they first moved in, thespecific Diana visit of the first month, the bag and the plan and the assessment of thehallway and the comment about the hall table needing to be slightly further from thedoor. She had come again in the summer. This visit was different from those visits in away she understood before Diana had come through the door, the way she understoodthe quality of the Diana visits from the quality of the advance notice.Diana had said, on the Sunday call in February: I want to see the garden in March.Not the house. The garden. Specifically. March.She had thought about this.She thought it was because Diana had been told about the garden — she had describedthe garden to Diana on the Sunday calls across the months since the move, the bench inthe corner and the east-bed plant and the baby under the bench and the spring that wascoming. Diana had received all of these descriptions with the at

CHAPTER 173- What The Baby Knows

At two she had opinions.This was not new — she had been forming opinions since approximately the third week,the opinion about the breast versus the bottle and the opinion about the morning versusthe evening and the opinion about the quality of attention being given to her at any givenmoment, all of which she had communicated with the full force of the availablecommunication methods. But at two she had opinions with language. She had words forthe opinions and she used the words with the directness of a person who had beenwaiting for the tools and was now using them.She had opinions about the garden.The garden had opinions of its own and her opinions and the garden’s opinionssometimes aligned and sometimes did not. The garden’s opinion about what grew wherewas not always the same as her opinion about what should grow where, and thenegotiations that resulted from this had a specific quality that Olivia found instructive.She had opinions about the bench.The bench was the ben

CHAPTER 174- The Academy, Year Three

In his third full year the academy felt like his.She had noticed this the way she noticed the developments in the things she cared mostabout, which was slowly and then all at once, the gradual change becoming visible onlywhen it had accumulated enough to be visible, the way the flat had become theirs not ona specific day but suddenly all at once on the Tuesday in April when she had put her keyin the bowl and understood she was home.The academy had become his at some point in the third year.She went on a Thursday in October, the October of the third full year, and she sat in thechair in the office and she watched him through the window with the fixed blind and sheunderstood that what she was seeing was not the academy in the first year, the carefulattention of a man who was still learning the shape of the thing, or the academy in thesecond year, the man who had learned the shape and was working within it with thespecific competence of the learning completed. She was seeing

CHAPTER 175- Her Room

She worked in the room with the south light on Tuesday and Thursday mornings whenshe was not at the practice.The arrangement had developed naturally across the first year in the new house, theway the good arrangements developed, through the doing of it and the finding of thedoing working and the consolidating of the working into the pattern. She worked in herroom Tuesday and Thursday mornings and she was at the practice Tuesday throughThursday afternoons and on Wednesdays. The arrangement gave her the mornings andthe commuting gave the afternoons and the pattern had the quality of a thing that suitedher specifically, which was the quality of the arrangement she had been looking forwhen she wrote a room for me on his list in September.She had not known, writing it, exactly what she was asking for.She had known she needed the room. She had not known what the room was going togive her.She knew now.The room gave her the work at the right pace.She had been doing the professi

CHAPTER 176-The Curtain

She put up curtains in the spring of the second year.Not in the hallway — the hallway had the curtain rail with nothing on it, as it had alwayshad, the specific choice of the rail without the curtain that she had been making sincethe first week of the flat. She put up curtains in the other rooms, the rooms that neededthem, the rooms where the evening light required the managing and the morning lightneeded the ability to be excluded on the days she wanted to sleep past the dawn.She had not had curtains in the flat.The flat’s windows had had blinds, the specific blinds that had come with the flat andthat she had not replaced because the blinds were adequate and the replacing of themhad not seemed worth the effort. She had been in the flat for six years with the blindsand the blinds had been the blinds.The new house had no blinds.The new house had the windows, which were the right windows, and the windows hadnothing in them, and in the first year this had been fine, the noth

HAPTER 177- The Sunday Morning Conversation

The conversation arrived on a Sunday morning in April when they were at the kitchentable with the coffee and the April light in the kitchen and the baby at nursery — notnursery, it was Sunday, the baby was at Diana’s, Diana taking the baby for a Sundaymorning on a quarterly basis with the specific intention of giving them the Sundaymorning without the baby, which Diana had proposed in the spring of the first year andwhich they had accepted with the gratitude of two people who had been raising a babyfor several months and understood the specific gift of a Sunday morning.They had the Sunday morning.It was the kind of Sunday morning the flat had been known for, the specific quality of theSunday that had been theirs across the years, the coffee and the quiet and the particularunhurriedness of the day that did not yet require anything of them.He was reading something.She was at the window.She had been standing at the kitchen window with the coffee and the April garden andshe

CHAPTER 178- What Remains

On a Sunday evening in May she stood in the kitchen with the last of the washing updone and the house quiet around her and she felt the specific quality of beingcompletely present.Not the meditated version, not the practised version, not the version she brought to theconsulting room with the specific professional attention of a decade of the work. Theordinary version. The version that was simply the quality of a person who had beenpractising the being-present for long enough that the being-present was now thedefault, the floor she stood on rather than the achievement she was reaching toward.She was present.The washing up was done and the house was quiet and she was in the kitchen in the Mayevening and she was present.She thought about what remained.The everything she had been inventorying since October, the autumn inventory of thethings that had accumulated, the bowl and the shelf and the photograph and the curtainrail and the garden and the bench. She had been thinking

CHAPTER 179- The New House Window

She stood at the window in October.Not the kitchen window with the garden below, though that window too. The window inher room on the first floor, the south window, the window she had known from the listingwas the right window before she had stood in the room and before she had seen it inOctober light.She was standing in the October light at the first-floor window.She had been writing in the room all morning and she had reached the place in thewriting where the writing needed to pause and let the thinking catch up, the specificpause she had come to trust across the months of the Tuesday and Thursday mornings,the knowing that the pause was not the stopping but the part of the process where thenext thing was forming and the forming required the quiet of the pausing.She stood at the window.The garden was below in its October quality, the specific quality of a garden that hadbeen through its second autumn, the beds having the knowledge of two years now, thesoil amended and t

CHAPTER 180- The Last Chapter

She put the curtain rail up in the hallway of the new house on the fifth day, which wasthe day she had decided the curtain rail belonged on the wall rather than on the hallwayfloor, which was the day she stood in the new hallway with the screwdriver and theladder and the specific sense that the doing of it was the right doing of it, the beginningof the new place.She was thinking about this again.She was in the room with the south light on a Tuesday morning in November and shewas writing, the specific writing that was the writing she had been doing since thespring, the thing she had been doing on Tuesday mornings for the months since thespring when it had begun as the personal writing in the garden corner with the notebookand had moved indoors to the desk with the south window and had become what it wasnow, which was still not quite named but was in the process of being named through thedoing of it.She was writing about the curtain rail.Not only the curtain rail. She was

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