“My goal is equanimity,” he said. “I’m not pursuing what the world calls success.”

The staff at the homeless shelter where I worked for several years had long worried about him. He sat in the day hall, well tended and polite, reading chemistry textbooks with calm comprehension. At the moment, he was in the middle of a book written by a French philosopher in the 1930s; he was reading it in French.

He had no previous psychiatric history, no drug or alcohol problem. Someone without any overt chaos in his life accepted his state of homelessness without the least effort to modify it. It seemed unnatural.

He tried to explain. “There’s mismanagement between what others expect me to do and what I have done,” he said. “I don’t examine my life too closely. I have closed the doors against re-examination.”

In other words, there was no point in asking further questions. Having no other tools, though, I continued to ask.

Staff members had described him as a man filled with thought, but empty of feeling. Why? There was a reason for this, he said. The emotions of other people were upsetting to him. It was not a normal psychological state, and he realized it. At one point, in an effort at rectification and social exposure, he had briefly volunteered in a library, shelving books. Contrary to what he had expected, shelving was not boring to a mind that read French philosophy in French. “I move plenty of mental furniture,” he said.

We reviewed the customary personal history. He came from a military family; continual migrations, adaptation and, as a result, what he called “strategic disconnection.” There were no friends. There was no current family contact. Life was lived at a distance, in third person. Social isolation was a relief.

There was another reason for his strategic disconnection. “Factually,” he said, “my attitude has been a hazard to others.”

He told this story: For a few years he had shared an apartment with an alcoholic companion. They lived in compatible, side-by-side solitude, two bedrooms and a kitchen.

One morning, leaving the apartment, he passed his roommate slumped over the kitchen table. He did not pause to check on the man. He spent his day as usual. When he returned that evening, his roommate was still slumped over the table. If he had not been dead earlier, he was now.

There was no sensation of remorse or guilt, he said now. There was no sense that he should have taken investigative action that might have been life-saving, or that he should have fretted during the day, or considered coming home earlier.

From this episode, he drew two rational conclusions. First, his instincts about human situations were always wrong. Second, it was appropriate that a person with such dangerous attributes separate himself from the world.

The confession — although for him it was just a factual recounting — was illuminating. Maybe some sort of rectification was possible. Maybe, with rigorous philosophical inquiry, he could conclude that he was not a hazard to others and did not need to absent himself from the world to protect it.

I suggested a second meeting.

Politely, calmly, he repeated himself. Listening was alleged to be my business, but clearly I had not heard him correctly the first time. “I am not pursuing what the world calls success,” he said.

Enough contact was enough. This was now too much. When he left, he didn’t look back.

Dr. Elissa Ely is a psychiatrist in Boston.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/health/views/03cases.html?scp=1&sq=A%20life%20apart&st=cse

Alan Davidson is the founder of ThroughYourBody.com and the author Body Brilliance: Mastering Your Five Vital Intelligences, the #1 bestselling Health & Welness book and winner of two National Book-of-the-Year awards.

Alan is also the author of the Free report “Body Breakthroughs for Life Breakthroughs: How to Peak Your Physical, Emotional, Mental, Moral, and Spiritual IQs for a Sensational Life” available at www.throughyourbody.com

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