Jaume Soler and Mercè Conangla are known in the Spanish-speaking world for having formalised what they call emotional ecology: the idea that our emotions are managed like an environment, with renewable energies and polluting ones, leaks to be plugged, resources to be invested and a climate that each of us helps to overheat or to clear around them. Corazón que siente, ojos que ven applies this framework to the broadest question there is: what do we do with the time we are given?

A wake-up book

The starting point is arithmetical and deliberately blunt. Twenty-four hours multiplied by three hundred and sixty-five days, over a life expectancy of seventy-five years, gives some 650,000 hours. One third goes into sleep, one third into what the authors call upkeep — working in order to live, getting about, waiting, eating, looking after oneself. That leaves one third that is really ours: the time to learn, to love, to create, to dream. It is that third the book takes as its subject, and the question it asks as a refrain is: “Is there life before death?”

The second movement of the argument is that of responsibility, and this is where the authors’ thinking meets an intuition familiar to systemic practitioners: no one is a neutral element in the system they inhabit. We take part in it either by contributing to its balance or by destabilising it; ignorance is no defence and being small exempts no one from anything. Hence the formula that runs through the whole book: if we want to change something in the world, the only purchase we have is changing ourselves.

The third movement is that of effort, a word the authors reclaim against the spirit of an age in which “everything flows of its own accord if you choose well”. Living is an art, they say, one that takes time, work and love; a good relationship does not come free, and a good old age even less so. Fear is described here as the dragon posted at the border of our inner territories: it steps aside only if we look it in the face.

The last movement, finally, takes up what we usually keep at a distance: fleetingness, the provisional, loss, old age, suffering, loneliness and death. The authors’ stance is preventive rather than reparative — you do not teach someone to swim at the moment the boat is going down — and they propose, as a daily exercise, the question the ancients asked themselves: “Is today the last day of my life?” Each chapter opens with a quotation (Nabokov, La Bruyère, Sagan, Nietzsche, Gould, Leibniz) and closes with a series of questions addressed to the reader, which the authors describe as “keys that you alone can use”.

What the book offers the therapist