What Stays With Us

I just returned from two weeks in Europe, first running a supervision intensive and then taking a cycling trip in Tuscany. One of the things that has stayed with me most happened on our day off.

I went to Pisa. Everyone knows the Leaning Tower, and beside it are the Cathedral and the Baptistery, but I found myself drawn to another building at the edge of the square: the Camposanto. It is an old burial ground, filled with tombs, sculpture, and enormous frescoes. There is a statue of Fibonacci standing there, and what is known as Galileo’s lamp nearby.

Much of what I saw has been uncovered, restored, moved, and put back together over decades. During the Second World War, the roof caught fire, and many of the frescoes were terribly damaged. When they were eventually lifted from the walls, something unexpected appeared underneath: the original drawings the artists had made before painting the frescoes. They had been there all along.

I have been thinking about that since I came home. About what becomes visible when something is taken away. But also about the way an experience continues after we have technically left it.

You see a piece of art and then, later, walking somewhere completely different, it comes back to you. I know that feeling after hearing music that has moved me, or after a long bicycle ride when some part of the ride is still moving through me even though I am already home. I have heard people describe the same thing after a great sporting event or performance. The event has ended, but the experience has not. Something lingers. Sometimes it is an image or a sound. Sometimes it is in the body. Sometimes it is something we do not yet have words for.

Relationships do this too.

Coaches live with endings all the time. A contract finishes exactly when everyone expects it to. A client decides they are done before we think they are. Someone disappears without really saying goodbye. Or we find ourselves knowing that the work has reached a natural stopping place, even though some part of us would happily continue.

We call these things completion, termination, or the end of an engagement. Lately, though, I have been wondering whether the ending itself is only part of what is happening. Something remains. I am becoming increasingly interested in what that something is.

After I returned from Europe, a coach I supervised brought an ending into our work together. They had been working with a client, and their scheduled final session was approaching. The coach had a completion exercise from their training and read it to me. There was care in it, and good questions about what had changed, what had been difficult, what the client had accomplished, and what they wanted to carry forward.

As I listened, though, I noticed that I was not particularly interested in helping make the exercise better. I was more curious about the coach and what was happening as they prepared to say goodbye to someone they had come to know.

So I asked, “What is your relationship to saying goodbye?”

They sat back and smiled. Something shifted between us. After a moment, they said, “Oh my gosh, when you ask me that, it feels so good to be part of this.”

That stayed with me.

The coach had arrived wanting to think about how to create a meaningful ending for their client. Suddenly, the ending was giving us a way to learn something about the coach. We were not only looking at what they might say or what questions they might ask. We could become curious about who they are when something is ending. What they might rush toward or away from. What saying goodbye brings up. And how all of that may already be in the room with the client.

This is where supervision becomes particularly interesting to me.

A coach can bring in a client and ask, in one way or another, What do I do here? Sometimes that is exactly what we need to look at. Underneath it, though, there is often another question: Who am I while I am doing it?

As I listened to this coach, I found myself thinking about their relationship with the client. I was also thinking about the relationship between the two of us. At some point, our work will end too. How will we do that? What will we know about one another then that we could not possibly have known when we began?

I pay a great deal of attention to pacing. Going deeper faster does not necessarily get us somewhere more useful. Sometimes we need to move laterally for a while. To circle something. To move toward it and away from it. To leave enough room to notice what changes.

If I become too attached to getting somewhere, I can miss the person entirely.

My experience working with groups and teams has influenced me deeply here as well. Endings need time. Someone leaving is not simply an announcement followed by one final conversation. There is room for different responses to emerge, and feelings do not necessarily arrive on schedule.

Someone may initially feel relieved and later discover sadness. Someone may want to hurry away while someone else wants to hold on. There may be anger, gratitude, silence, or something we do not understand yet. None of it has to be resolved immediately.

I know something about wanting to hurry away myself.

There is a pattern in me, something I associate with my own history and lineage, where leaving first has sometimes felt safer than waiting for something to be taken away. What I have learned is that leaving quickly does not actually make me feel safer. It makes me more anxious.

When I know an ending is coming and allow myself to move toward it slowly, I have a different experience. There is time to say what I thought I wanted to say and perhaps discover something else underneath it. There is time for the other person to do the same. And there is time for the space between us, for the relationship itself.

Maybe this is why I no longer think of an ending as one conversation.

Living in Colorado, where nature is truly a force, I am constantly reminded that change does not happen all at once. There are different movements, different things that shift, sometimes almost imperceptibly, before something new appears.

I think endings can be like that too.

With enough time, we can look back toward the beginning and remember what we thought we were setting out to do. We can look at what actually developed between us: what became meaningful, what was difficult, what we wanted more of, and what we never quite got to. Eventually, we begin to turn toward what happens when we are no longer meeting.

That last part excites me.

Throughout my work, I have held a consistent lens of integration, although my understanding of what that means has unfolded slowly over time. I am increasingly interested in what happens after an intervention, after a session, after a relationship, when the person goes back into their life, and something begins to reorganize.

We do not know exactly what another person is going to carry with them. Months later they may hear something that reminds them of a conversation we had. They may meet a new client and understand something differently. They may have a feeling, an image, or a bodily memory return before they quite know why.

I do not know that a relationship ever becomes complete.

A cycle can complete. The meetings can stop. The contract can finish. But the experience can continue to have a life outside the room. We remember people through our senses, associations, and feelings. Something we hear or see suddenly wakes up a memory. A good experience with someone becomes part of what we know. Sometimes that memory brings us back to them, or makes us think of them when someone else needs what they offered.

That is not an advertisement. It is simply one of the ways relationships continue.

I have experienced the other side too, when an ending does not have enough room.

Recently, a professional relationship in my own life ended without my knowing it was ending. There was not a dramatic betrayal, but we never had the ending. It hurt. I felt unseen, dismissed, and misunderstood. My first response was the one I know well: I wanted to run away.

The fact that I am still thinking about it tells me something about what can happen when a relationship ends before there has been enough time to recognize that it is ending.

This is also why I go to supervision myself.

Even after all these years of supervising others, I do not want to do this work alone. Sometimes I need to walk or get on my bicycle, cook, listen to music, or simply be in my house without moving immediately into whatever is next. Sometimes I need another person who will sit with me and help me become curious about what happened, particularly when I am quite certain that I already know.

Curiosity, for me, creates spaciousness.

It makes things less polarizing. It makes room for the unknown. It gives me somewhere to go other than deciding whether I handled something well or badly. It reminds me that every new relationship gives me another opportunity to learn something about myself.

I think that matters in this profession. If we stop learning about ourselves, I am not sure how we can continue asking other people to do the same.

Knowing myself better has changed the way I work, but it has also changed the way I live. I deepen. I mature. I like myself and my work more. I am better when I go home.

Work influences my personal life, and I do not want to bring home everything I was not willing to attend to during the day. I want a full life, with my work and my family and my body and my bicycle, cooking, being alone, and being with people, all belonging to the same life.

Years ago, I heard George Harrison speaking about death.* I do not remember the exact broadcast, and I have carried the feeling of what he said longer than the circumstances in which I heard it. Later, I found an interview from 1997 in which he said that people spend so much time rushing around, yet “nobody’s trying to figure out what’s the cause of death, and what happens when you die.” He went on: “That, to me, is the only thing that’s of any importance. The rest is all secondary.”

I do not take that as an instruction to know what happens after we die. I do not know. What stays with me is his willingness to turn toward the question.

There is something in that for me about living, not only dying. About the tenderness of life. About the possibility that when we are willing to acknowledge an ending, rather than rush past it or make it neat too quickly, we may become more available to what is still here.

Perhaps that is part of why the Camposanto followed me home from Europe.

On a day when I was not even on my bicycle, I stood in a place where something had been taken away and, underneath, something else had become visible that had been there all along. I do not want to make too much of the metaphor. But I do wonder what becomes visible in our work when we give an ending enough time.

The client goes on. The coach goes on. I go on. Something of what happened between us comes along too.

We may not recognize it at first.

Perhaps that is part of what an ending gives us: not simply a chance to say goodbye, but time to notice what we are carrying with us before we move into whatever comes next.

*George Harrison’s comments are from a July 24, 1997 interview with John Fugelsang, recorded during an appearance with Ravi Shankar to discuss Chants of India.