Thanks for dropping in! My name is Jacob Waite & YesToAllOfIt is a new thing I’m trying to do. I really appreciate you taking the time to have a look. So, who am I and what is the intention behind the site? Professionally, I am a clinical psychologist and work with the over 65s in NHS mental health services. Outside of work I am, amongst other things, a husband, father, brother and son. It is a privilege to be and do all these things. When all is said and done, it’s a privilege to be alive. However, despite all of this privilege, until quite recently the experience of being alive has been something of a strain. At times it has felt a bit like being forced (by what or by whom I was never quite sure) to live under water, occasionally surfacing when conditions allowed for a breath of pure beauty, truth, freedom and love only to be pushed under again with no certainty that I would ever taste something like that again. I spent so long under water that I began to wonder if I had dreamed the fresh air altogether, whether there was only this heavy water above me, and whether the natural tendency I felt for my body to float upwards was something best ignored.
And then people started to die. My parents both died in 2018, aged 69 and 74, the pandemic scythed down large numbers of my clients, and a close colleague took his life in 2022. These events were not the cause of what happened next (if you become a regular around here you will start to see that I am philosophically sceptical about the idea of ultimate causes) but they definitely stand out as I look back. It is as if these shocks confronted me with my own mortality which, up until this point, had been an inconvenient fact that, with encouragement from a capitalist consumerist culture, I was inclined to put to one side and ignore. And with this confrontation arose a new more consistent capacity to be directly in contact with things as they are, openly to experience the world, rather than to think about or analyse it. I began to feel the truth that I and every other human being, and every thing that exists, is a unique event in the history of the universe, none of which could be exactly as it is were it not for its ongoing and evolving relationship with every other thing that is. I began to marvel at the evanescent, blink-and-you-miss it-once-and-forever-beauty of this ‘isness’ which is never still for even a moment, impossible to capture definitively in numbers or words, always changing, now and now and now. I had not been under water dreaming of fresh air. I had been asleep. It was the water that was the dream, and the air that was the truth. I began to see ways of letting this capacity inform my daily practice of living. I began to see and to reach out towards the possibility of a richer, more meaningful participation in the world, to hear and sing along with the song of everything which had always been there, if only I had known how to listen. And part of this reaching out was an irresistible urge to do my very best to make all of this available to others. Another way of saying all of this, as it says in the tagline, is that I am seeking to cultivate appetitive learning in myself and others. Interbehavioural psychology, poetry and philosophy are overlapping means towards this end. If some of this language is unfamiliar at this point, hang in there – all will be revealed!
In short, I am a 51 year-old, British, white, middle class man having a not very British, not very let’s-not-make-too-much-of-a-fuss-about-it-and-look-the-other-way midlife-crisis (a.k.a awakening) and it is in the context of this that I am saying ‘Yes To All Of It’ and offering you ‘Yes To All Of It’ as both a perspective and a practice.
Yes To All Of It 